EATING OUR FEELINGS
store into a lunch counter ca- tering to local garment-factory workers. Soon, customers were showing up for a late weekend breakfast. By the 1960s, their only child, Larry — Elana’s dad — joined the business. When Elana started working in the family restaurant, Hymie was 83. He continued working another 13 years. In the hospi- tal, when he told a nurse that he needed to schedule his kid- ney dialysis at the end of the day because of his job, they told his wife that they thought he had dementia. The family had to confirm that this 96-year-old really did work every day. So Elana was close with her zayde. And yet they didn’t share meals, owing to his odd eat- ing habits. Hymie would walk around the restaurant with an unlit cigar in his mouth. Not allowed to light it, he’d chew on the cigar and leave it around the restaurant, letting Elana find it in random places. When he got hungry, he insisted on cooking for himself. “I had four cooks in the kitch- en that would have been happy to make him lunch,” remem- bers Elana. “When he decided he was hungry, it didn’t matter how busy we were. He would go behind the counter, take an onion roll and put it in the toaster. And he would make himself a salami sandwich with coleslaw, cut it, put it on a plate, and go get a Coke. And he would sit down at the counter and he would eat that.” Elana loves a salami on an onion roll, too. But she’s not like- ly to make it herself in the mid- dle of a busy lunch service — or
The secret to this dish is that it isn’t about the eggs — not really. What makes it compelling is the flavour of caramelized onions, which infuse every bite with a smokey sweetness.
to have told her zayde what to do in his own business. It may be unfashionable today, but anything with fried onions is her favourite food. “When I smell onions frying, I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s my smell,’” she says, as if describing jasmine or lilacs. Even non-food spaces with that lingering scent instil comfort in her. “You walk into an apartment building, and you’re walking down the hall, and you know that old Jews are living there because of all the onions frying.” Nowhere is the family’s ad- oration of onions more evident than in the restaurant’s signa- ture dish: the mishmash. Os- tensibly a fry-up of eggs, salami, hot dogs, and bell peppers, the dominant flavour comes from caramelized onions. Lurking in
the plate of eggs is practically an entire onion, reduced down to a quarter cup and seductively sweetened from the release of its sugar during a low, slow cook. The love of fried onions wasn’t inherited by her firstborn, Ruby, who was so finicky that Elana couldn’t pack sandwiches in her school lunch. Her young- est, Lewis, is a different matter: “We definitely share that bond,” Elana says. “In the kitchen, he was always at my elbow, because food is our love language.” With anyone else, she doesn’t like to share her kitchen. With him, it’s one of her favourite things in life. Lewis started off at Con- cordia University, studying economics (his father is an economist). But, when it began to not feel right, Elana nudged
38 SUMMER 2026
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