Meet Larry Finkelstein, New York’s Rugelach Master
The man behind S&P's iconic (and endangered) cookie. Plus, his recipe!
Here’s something fun for warmer nights: Bar Oliver is kicking off a Pintxo Series on the first Monday of every month, featuring guest chefs collaborating on five small dishes available for one night only. The first is next week, 5/4, with Elijah Tarlow, a sous-chef at Borgo. Here’s a tiny scoop: Julia Sherman is slated for June.
I’m calling it: it’s going to be the summer of the marg. The Mexican wave is not slowing down, with recent arrivals including Bar Chucho from the Corima/Vato crew (where the focus is more on micheladas, but I’d bet they mix an excellent margarita) and a rehabbed Bar Bruno promising “better margs.” The ever-popular Santo Taco, ripe for swift expansion, specializes in tacos and margaritas. And the first cocktail on the drinks menu at Dean’s, arguably the buzziest new opening in town, is a luminous—and from what I hear, very good—marg, laced with chili and carrot. Martinis are forever, but the trend is worn out, and after the worst winter in recent memory, New York is ready for something with a skip in its step. Plus, in a world where we’re drinking less—in part because hangovers have become too much to bear—it’s well-known that agave spirits offer a cleaner buzz. My preference? Spicy mezcal.
Is it just me, or is BoCoCa the “region” of the moment? Sure, I live here, and yes, I’ve been a bit of a homebody lately, and yet… Sam’s Restaurant is being revived, the Ferdinando’s Foccaceria revamp is here, the new owners of the aforementioned Bar Bruno (also of Greenpoint Fish and Lobster) have brought it new life and a predilection for quality fish and seafood, the Ingas Bar sequel is on its way, and Taqueria Ramirez is arriving late summer. Meanwhile, Brooklyn Granary & Mill just celebrated its one-year anniversary, cementing Carroll Gardens—also home to the phenomenon that is ACQ Bread Co.—as the preeminent destination for Very Good Bread. Tragically, however, as reported by Court Street Journal, Caputo Bakery, makers of my favorite rainbow cookie in the neighborhood, suddenly closed this week after 124 years in business.
Which leads me into our profile today, featuring a man too few New Yorkers know, who quietly makes the city’s very best rugelach—a cookie too few New Yorkers are familiar with—from a commercial kitchen in, where else? Carroll Gardens.
It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in Carroll Gardens, and Larry Finkelstein, clad in a white apron over a navy blue t-shirt, his stark white hair freshly cut, is rolling out a sheet of cream cheese-enriched dough on a stainless steel counter. He’s surrounded by tubs of coleslaw, tuna salad, and pickled jalapeños, which makes sense, given that he’s working out of the commissary kitchen of Court Street Grocers, the cult-favorite sandwich shop co-owned by his son, Eric Finkelstein. The task at hand? Making raspberry-raisin rugelach, his signature flavor of the flaky, filled, and rolled Ashkenazi cookie—once easy to find in New York’s myriad Jewish bakeries, and now something of an endangered species.
Next, he slathers Polaner raspberry preserves on top of his thin rectangular canvas, using an offset spatula to paint the jam to the edges, then sprinkles raisins all over, before rolling the dough into a neat spiral. “I use Polaner because my grandmother always had it,” Larry, who is 74 and a native New York Jew, says. Larry brushes his log with heavy cream, coats it completely in cinnamon-sugar, and cuts it into 30 pieces. He barely counts, relying instead on muscle memory: “What’s amazing, after cutting I don’t know how many thousands of these things, is that it just happens,” he says.
Larry’s recipe produces what, to me, are perfect rugelach: flaky and rich, with a crisp crust and caramelized bottom—the result of the preserves seeping through the cookies’ seams and coalescing into a glassy sheet of sugar—and juicy raisins in each bite. The flavor is pleasingly tart, a tad salty, and appropriately sweet. They’re available for $2.50 a pop (or $8.00 for 4) at S&P Lunch, the lunch (and now dinner) counter in Flatiron owned by Eric and his partner, Matt Ross—and you can also find them at the original Carroll Gardens location of Court Street Grocers, where, on some days, they also sell Larry’s chocolate variety, replete with silky ganache and miniature chocolate chips.
Yet Larry’s rugelach have remained something of an if-you-know-you-know phenomenon. This is partly because people have, largely, forgotten about rugelach. Back when Larry was growing up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, every neighborhood where Jews were living had a Jewish bakery, usually several. Now, shops that sell challah and hamantaschen are few and far between, even compared to when I was a kid in downtown Manhattan in the ‘90s, chomping on rugelach at family gatherings. You can still find particularly good rugelach at Zabar’s, naturally, and at Zoë Kanan’s New York Jewish-inspired bakery, Elbow Bread, where they’re filled with crunchy cocoa nibs and sprinkled with demerara sugar. But for me, Larry’s are the best rugelach left in New York.
“At my aunt Esther’s shiva, my cousin got rugelach from Costco. It was disgusting. I thought, ‘You know, I could do better than this.’”
“He’s the master of rugelach in my eye, and he’s a rugelach baker, that’s his title,” says Kanan, who met Larry when she was opening Elbow Bread in partnership with the Court Street Grocers duo. The first time she tried his raspberry-raisin cookie, she was in awe. “It was the perfect [homemade] specimen,” she recalls. “The raisins absorb the jam and cling to it, creating these little gaps, and the cinnamon-sugar on top adds a crispy texture, which is key with the flakiness of the pastry and the chewiness of the raisins,” she says.
Kanan and Larry once taught a rugelach class together for the nonprofit organization Hot Bread Kitchen, demonstrating his old-school style versus her more new-school approach. “The attendees had no idea what they were in for,” she says. “Half of them had never heard of rugelach before, and they came away as experts.”
Before he turned to baking, Larry was a career lawyer raising Eric in Hollis Hills, Queens, alongside his ex-wife. Then, in the 1990s, after divorcing Eric’s mother, he moved to Long Island City, came out of the closet, and taught himself to cook by watching the Food Network. Along the way, he developed a knack for baking and invested in his first appliance, a KitchenAid. His sweets know-how would become one of the defining pleasures of his new life. At first, he specialized in cakes, his favorite being Ina Garten’s buttery coconut cake. But his rugelach journey began in 2003. “My aunt Esther died, and at her shiva, my cousin got rugelach from Costco. It was disgusting. I thought, ‘You know, I could do better than this.’”
Larry went online, found a few recipes, and got to work, eventually developing a bulk rugelach dough that calls for one-and-a-half pounds of flour, one pound of butter, and one pound of cream cheese, contrary to the typical 1:1:1 ratio—which, he thinks, works better for the crescent shape associated with Israeli-style rugelach (his produces the more rustic rolled spiral). Once, he won a rugelach bake-off against a woman in his bridge class at the Upper West Side Jewish Community Center. “She never came back,” Larry says, laughing. “Hers were soft and gushy; it was just not this.”
Today, he makes 360 cookies a week—270 raspberry-raisin for S&P, and another 90 for the sandwich shop—arriving at the Court Street commissary in the evenings, after the prep cooks have wrapped up for the day. As he bakes, he often listens to podcasts (only those made by Carroll Gardens residents, he jokes: Ilana Levine’s Little Known Facts, Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out, and Francis Lam’s The Splendid Table).
Larry has been selling his rugelach since Court Street Grocers opened in 2010. “Eric came to me and said, ‘Dad, would you make rugelach for the opening?’’’ He recalls. “I said, ‘Sure, but people in the neighborhood aren’t going to know what it is. And he said, ‘Dad, just make it.’ People loved it, and 15 years later, I’m still doing it.”
Larry was kind enough to share his recipe with The Angel. I tested them at home last week. They’re irresistibly delicious.
Makes 30 cookies
