Munching through New York's immigrant history

NEW YORK - At the rumbling corner of Delancey and Essex Streets in Manhattan's fabled Lower East Side, a sandal-footed, backpack-wearing Josh Wolff stands before his two-dozen charges and promises a real taste of the neighborhood.

"And since this is July," the tour guide says, "I assume you'll be getting the smells of the neighborhood as well."

On this steamy city afternoon, we find Wolff at the appointed corner, collecting $20 a head from a swarm of folks eager to explore enclaves thick with that most American of histories -- that of its immigrants.

It's the Original Multi-Ethnic Eating Tour, one of the most popular of the 30 or so led by Big Onion Walking Tours. And for good reason. The two-hour excursion takes us through the web of neighborhoods bite by bite, as we sample the cultural delicacies that tell the tale of a city that was, and is.

And so we go, heading east on Delancey, then south onto Norfolk. We pause in front of Beth Hamedrosh Hagadol, the oldest Orthodox synagogue of Russian Jews in the United States. In a neighborhood once home to 350,000 Jews, that once swelled with 300 synagogues, the aging structure is one of just a dozen that remain.

Wolff asks our group -- foreign tourists, families and history buffs -- whether any of our relatives ever called this pocket of the city home. A hand rises. Just as Wolff expected. There's usually at least one in a group our size, he says, given the waves of immigrants who've passed through for more than a century in search of the cheap rents and work opportunities the neighborhood promised.

Irish, Italian, Russian, German, Jewish, Chinese, Cuban, Dominican. You'll find them all here, if only in building plaques and street names. Today, as the Lower East Side shifts under yet another demographic tide, Wolff says you can add another group to that list: hipster.

The neighborhood of cheap rents has faded, as swank boutiques, condos and coffee shops favored by fashionista types replace the storefronts once home to ethnic bakeries and butchers.

As the neighborhood changes, so must the tour. Just weeks earlier, Wolff tells us, we would have nibbled flaky rugalach from Gertel's, a Jewish bakery and Hester Street institution for more than 90 years. Today, the building, since sold, is shuttered, poised to become a 10-story condo building. Alas, there'll be rugalach no more.

Which gets us back to the eats.

Wolff reaches into a plastic New York shopping bag. He pulls out two tin containers of fried plantains, fresh from El Castillo, a Rivington Street store owned by a Cuban and staffed by Dominican workers -- an overlapping of cultures that he says is the neighborhood's running theme.

We pluck at the warm, gooey slices. As they melt in our mouths, Wolff explains they're a nod to the Hispanic population that, beginning in the 1960s, poured into the Alphabet City section of the Lower East Side, christening it, in their pronunciation, the "Loisaida."

We stop at Norfolk and Grand, a stretch once considered the Jewish food district. A few vestiges remain, like Kossar's, the oldest bialy shop in the United States.

A bialy, you ask? If it weren't for the New York bagel's smug success, you'd know this doughy roll. Whereas a bagel is boiled then baked, a bialy is only baked. But for whatever reason, the bagel took off, Wolff says, leaving the bialy in its floury dust.

We won't be sampling them today, he says, "because if we had bialies, we'd get so full, we wouldn't be able to eat more."

So it's on to the pickles.

A neighborhood once dotted with barrels of "the poor man's winter food" is now down to two: Guss' Pickles on Orchard Street and The Pickle Guys, opened in 2003 on Essex Street by a former Guss' employee. And now the pickle wars rage, Wolff says.

Betraying his allegiance, he leads us into The Pickle Guys, where the workers greet us with a New York-style "Heeeeyyyy!"

We munch their crisp pickles, taking in the tiny shop crammed with red barrels of garlic, tomatoes, carrots and celery -- all pickled. Not so appetizing to some.

But for those of us with hard-to-pronounce Eastern European last names, it induces childhood memories and compels us to leave with heavy plastic bags.

On Hester Street, it's sweet, chalky-tasting halvah, where Wolff takes us back to the days of outdoor pushcart vendors.

Then it's dim sum on Pell Street, where he schools us on passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first major U.S. restriction on immigration. We wind our way through Chinatown, past the cobblers and storefronts of curious dried meats, and pause again in Columbus Park.

There we get our lesson in the surrounding blocks' fabled history as the Five Points neighborhood, a notorious slum of poor, fractious immigrants recounted with great fanfare, if not pristine historical accuracy, in Martin Scorsese's film "The Gangs of New York." And there we get our next treat.

Wolff reaches into his bag, pulling out two packages of "candy." They're dried snacks from Aji Ichiban, a large chain that Wolff likens to the Starbucks of Chinese candy stores that's slowly wiping out the local mom-and-pops. We reach cautiously into the first bag for sweet, slightly salty dried plums. Not too shabby. I go in for another.

Then Wolff holds out a package of what he dubs "fish jerky" -- likely dried mackerel. The walkers look tentatively at the skinny gray sticks. We chew. We swallow. And Wolff asks, "What do you think, folks? These fish sticks -- are they a keeper?"

I reach in for a second and third. Salty? Chewy? What's not to like?

Past ringing church bells and sidewalk gelato and espresso vendors, we wind our way into the "fakery" of Little Italy.

Once an authentic Italian enclave, Wolff explains, it's now an Albanian neighborhood whose buildings boast Italian names and whose units are now home to Chinese immigrants.

Still, authenticity remains in generations-old stores like DiPalo's Fine Foods, where we swarm around Wolff to get fresh mozzarella, Parmigiano-Reggiano and slices of sopressata salami.

It's the final stop. A few fingers fumble for another helping of cheese, and then our group scatters into all directions of the Lower East Side, minds and bellies full.

Just what Wolff likes.

"Walking tours are a great way to see the city...because you get to see things in detail you otherwise wouldn't be able to see. You get much more of a hands-on view of New York's layers," says Wolff, who, like many on the staff at Big Onion, is a grad student in history, working on his dissertation at Columbia University. By his count, he has led more than 500 tours.

What does he hope we see on the eating tour?

"The commonality between the different immigrant groups," he says. "That everyone in America is an immigrant, basically....And then maybe when they're thinking about the immigration issues of the present, they'll do so with a sense of history."

INFORMATION: 212-439-1090; www.bigonion.com