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Dough-re-mi
Couple rolls out batch of happy memories in deli business
By Marty Meitus, News Food Editor
What's the difference between a deli and a restaurant? "At the risk of sounding like a
cliche," says Joe Kaplan, owner of the Bagel Deli, "it's a place where everyone knows your name."
Indeed, as we talk, a woman rushes in, looking for Joe's wife, Rhoda, who co-owns the deli. She needs help planning her menu for the upcoming Jewish Passover seder, and only Rhoda's help will do.
According to Kaplan, the Bagel Deli is the oldest continuously family-owned deli in Denver. During the Passover holidays, the kosher-style deli features an extensive array of Passover foods, such as matzoh balls, kugels and desserts, along with their regular menu. This time of year, you'll find Rhoda Kaplan and Shirley Ross, who has been with the deli since the beginning, rolling matzoh balls and baking flourless brownies.
Rhoda Kaplan was 19 years old when her father and mother bought the original Bagel Deli in Mayfair in 1969. The seeds of her parents' successful union go back to Vienna, where her father helped her mother get a visa as the Hitler machine began to roll in. When he, too, was forced to flee, he followed Kaplan's mother to Denver, and they were married a few months later. |
Hal
Stoelzle © News
Passover
recipes prepared by Rhoda and Joe Kaplan, owners of Bagel Deli.
Clockwise from upper right corner: Haroset, Brownies, Potato Kugel,
Matzo Balls in Soup, Chopped Liver, Matzo. |
In the early years of their marriage, her father pursued a number of businesses, including owning the Bluebird Bar, which was across from the Bluebird Theater on East Colfax Avenue, where Rhoda and her brother often helped out after school. Her mother, active at her synagogue, was such an acknowledged cook that she was recommended for a job running the kitchen at Meadowhills Country Club. The experience led to buying the deli.
The Mayfair location was tiny. "We had community tables before they were popular," says Joe Kaplan.
When the Jewish population began moving southeast, so did the Kaplans, opening a second location in 1971 at Interstate 25 and East Hampden Avenue, where it is today. The site was chancy back then, given the lack of development in the southeast corridor; even an Albertson's didn't make it.
"There was nothing out here in the days when I-25 was called the Valley Highway," says Shirley Ross. To everyone's surprise, the deli took off.
Joe Kaplan, 50, came into the business through the back door. Originally from Wilmette, Ill., he met Rhoda at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1971, when she came to visit his Denver roommate, Ronny Bernstein, during Mardi Gras. "Ronny and I were just good friends," says Rhoda Kaplan. What sealed the deal, says her husband, "was she was cold and I had an electric blanket." Joe came along with the blanket, says Rhoda, "and the rest is history."
Joe Kaplan was planning to be a lawyer, but love intervened. Rhoda's father, who was less than pleased with Joe's hippie-era looks -- "he said, `Send us a picture when you cut your hair and beard so we know what you look like' " -- invited him to take a year off from school and work at the deli. He never looked back.
Rhoda Kaplan, meanwhile, couldn't find a teaching job, so she also entered the business, working in one location while her husband worked in the other. The couple had two children, Stephanie and Jared, and took over the business when Rhoda's dad retired.
In the '80s, Rhoda began to develop a reputation for her homemade cookies. She moved the business, Batter Brilliance, into a retail facility, eventually took it wholesale and finally sold it. Her claim to fame: long-stem chocolate chip cookie bouquets.
It might have been an idyllic existence, but tragedy struck the couple not once, but twice. In 1992, Joe's brother, David, an ABC producer working with Sam Donaldson, was shot and killed instantly by a sniper bullet in Sarajevo as he rode in a car from the airport. He was the only one hit.
The following year, Jared was visiting Stephanie at the University of Wisconsin when the college kids stormed the goalposts following a big football win. Seven kids were trampled, with Stephanie the most seriously injured. Coincidentally, the game was playing in the background at the deli when Jared called his parents to tell them what had happened.
Nothing could have prepared them, they say, for the experience of walking into the hospital and finding their child in a coma on life support. "After that," says Rhoda, "you find you can deal with anything. I wouldn't want anyone to go through what we did."
Amazingly, Stephanie recovered and today is married to Scott Scheimer, a winter wheat farmer in Cheyenne Wells. The couple has a baby named Noah David, after Joe's brother.
The tragic experiences taught them a number of life's lessons. Perhaps because he lost his brother so suddenly, Joe Kaplan says it taught him the real values in life: his family and his friends. "A good, close friend is so valuable to me," he says.
Rhoda Kaplan says the experiences taught her not to sweat the little things. "We're in the present and things are great, and that's the way we live our life," she says.
In the past 30 years, the Kaplans have seen tremendous changes in the restaurant business. They've closed the Mayfair store, and a deli venture downtown went south. Competition is fiercer, although in a more general way. "We're in competition with every restaurant in Denver," says Joe Kaplan. "If you eat somewhere else, you're not eating here, and that affects business."
Customers want creativity in a menu, but only up to a point, he says. "You can still change with the times, but they come here for a corned beef sandwich and matzoh ball soup." They also come for nostalgia, a desire for "homemade" foods like Grandma used to make.
What hasn't changed is the desire for personal service and the need for a place where everyone knows your name. "That's what a deli is," says Joe Kaplan. "It's like a house slipper. You walk in and you're comfy."
If You Go:
The Bagel Deli is at 6439 E. Hampden Ave., (303) 756-6667. It is open for dine in or take out, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday. (The restaurant stops serving 30 minutes before closing.)
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