As a child, Jeremy Salamon’s Rosh Hashanah menu could include charoset, latkes and Chinese takeaway. They were just the dishes that his Grandma Agi laid out on her table. Agi, after whom the 30-year old, award winning chef named his award-winning Brooklyn restaurant Agi’s Counter, is 96; and still lives in Florida where Salamon was raised, although sadly she’s now suffering from dementia.
“She had a very interesting way of presenting different foods — this melting pot of cuisines. Her table might include chicken paprikash with egg noodles together with eggplant (aubergine) parmigiana and Steak Diane. Italian, Hungarian and fifties American! All the influences of her life — fleeing Hungary and being a Jew literally poured out onto the table in a very unconventional way.
” “You literally didn’t know what you were going to get until you sat down. There was something very beautiful about that — it was like a world tour. One time she ordered in Lo Mein from a Chinese restaurant served with a Hungarian cauliflower dish and chicken parmigiana as well as a goulash — and she expected you to eat all of it.
” Agi grew up in Hungary and survived living in a Jewish ghetto in Budapest during the Second World War. She and her family then suffered the Stalinist regime that followed before she fled to America via Austria. Her husband Steve — whom she met in a New York dance hall — had also survived the war; escaping from a Nazi death camp before being hidden in a bar.