
Food for Thought
A man is what he eats. So wrote the nineteenth-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, and such is the premise underlying Ben Katchor’s monumental illustrated book The Dairy Restaurant.
Opening with an image of our earth coalescing from the primordial borscht—and replete with ancient tales, legendary patriarchs, Yiddish-language comic strips, and menus from long-vanished eateries—The Dairy Restaurant is a compendium of curious facts. More than that, it is a learned commentary (if not an encyclopedic midrash) on a particular Jewish American institution that is also, for the author, a lost