Corned beef doesn’t lie: Jake’s Deli is back
Carol Deptolla
After biting into a corned beef sandwich at Jake’s, I thought, “Jake’s is back.”
“Hang on,” you might say. “Jake’s never left.” True. A delicatessen has stood at 17th Street and North Avenue since the early 1900s, in what was then a neighborhood with many Jewish families. It’s been called Jake’s since Jake Levin bought it in 1955 from Ruben Cohen.
But since 2009, after decades of very little change, a series of operators took the deli’s reins, although Allan H. “Bud” Selig, the former commissioner of Major League Baseball, maintained ownership. (He became a partner in the deli in 1969, along with several other prominent Milwaukee businessmen to keep the deli alive. Selig was the last of the original partners.)
There were changes, not all of them bad (an online presence and computerized ordering were inevitable and probably desirable for most customers). But it seemed to me that with each new, well-meaning operator, Jake’s strayed further from the beloved original. The sandwiches weren’t the same. The soup no longer was made entirely from scratch.
Then, a year ago, Selig sold the business outright to Wajeeh Alturkman. Alturkman had a personal history with the deli — he was a customer years ago, while attending University of WisconsinMilwaukee and driving a cab for extra cash.
He’d gone on to open his own corned beef restaurant, House of Corned Beef, now at 5201 W. Silver Spring Drive. He knew from Jake’s what corned beef should be like.
And what Jake’s corned beef is again.
Flavorful, tender, just the right amount of melt-in-your-mouth fat. Still sliced by hand behind the counter for all to see, the sandwiches assembled right there, like Milwaukee’s original open-concept kitchen. And a long wooden pew still stands there for customers who’d like to sit and observe while they await their takeout