Can New York Be a Great Herring Town Again?

An Upper West Side spinoff of a Tel Aviv market kiosk is betting on it.

before new york was a bagels–lox–and– cream-cheese town, it was a herring town. The founding Dutch were pickled-herring addicts to a one. Ditto the English and Germans. And Joel Russ, the brains behind the most famous Jewish appetizing store in the world, did not get his start 120 years ago selling novi and babka to Sunday brunchers but rather peddling pickled herring from a barrel on the street. Times have changed. Among old-school noshers (the Underground Gourmet included), herring still exerts a certain nostalgic pull, and you cannot run a bona fide Jewish appetizing store without it. But in the current cured-and-smokedfish hierarchy, herring ranks toward the bottom— above chub, for sure, but decidedly below sturgeon, sable, salmon, and whitefish. So what to make of Sherry Herring (245 W. 72nd St.), a kosher counter-service specialist that opened recently on the Upper West Side? The signature dish takes a fillet of herring where no fillet of herring has ever gone before: onto a kosher baguette with butter, sour cream, onion, chiles, and cherry tomatoes that the open-kitchen crew squeeze like lemons over the sandwich. It works. The herring (a choice of matjes or schmaltz) is smooth and silky and, the owners would have you know, imported from a secret Holland source. Those owners include Israeli author and former food columnist Sherry Ansky, the shop’s namesake and something like the Ina Garten of Tel Aviv. Ansky opened the first Sherry Herring in that city’s Port Market in 2011, and now she and her daughter and son-in-law want to make it an international concern. The New York outpost traffics in a handful of other similarly dressed sandwiches such as smoked sardines, salted anchovies, and a chipotle-tuna spread—all terrific. You can eat them at a counter ledge or on an outside bench, but it’s better to take them three blocks to Central Park, allowing the flavors to meld, muffuletta style, along the way. For a no-holds-barred appetizing picnic, grab a pack of baguette crisps and some items from the refrigerator case, including herring and onions in cream sauce, Israeli pickles, and what has to be New York’s new No. 1 smokedwhitefish salad, a rich and chunky version that will ruin you for all others. It, by the way, would make a good sandwich.