Ben's Kosher Deli celebrates 50 years on Long Island

From bris to shiva, Ben’s is the go-to kosher deli for thousands of Long Islanders. The six-store chain helps commemorate life’s momentous events, providing a steady stream of soulful meals that can be enjoyed in one of its bustling dining rooms, at home with the family or, even, in the car where that knish was exactly what you needed to tide you over until dinner.

Walk into Ben’s in Greenvale or Woodbury or Carle Place and you are enveloped in a heady haze whose components — steaming pastrami, simmering chicken soup, sizzling hot dogs — capture the migration of Eastern European Jews to the U.S., and the assimilation of their food into the great melting pot of American cuisines.

Ronnie Dragoon has been at the helm of this enterprise since 1972 when he and his father, the eponymous Ben, opened their first kosher deli in Baldwin.

The achievement is all the more impressive considering that delis are not exactly “on an upward trajectory.” Over the past 10 years, he notes, Deli King in New Hyde Park, Andel’s in Roslyn Heights, Delsen’s in Bay Shore and Boomy’s in Plainview are among the local establishments that have gone to that big deli in the sky.

“When I was growing up and you wanted to go out,” Dragoon says, “it was kosher deli, pizza, Chinese. Now there are so many other choices.” And, he says, “with every generation removed from the immigrant experience, deli loyalty wanes.”

He counts among his customers countless old-timers who were raised in the deli tradition. Ben Sands has been coming to the Greenvale store since he moved to Port Washington in 1975. "Back then there were a lot of delis," he says, "but Ben's had the best pastrami sandwich — big, succulent. Why do you think I'm still coming back?"

MAKING OF A KOSHER DELI

Dragoon's deli roots go way back. His uncle, Nathan Nelson, was a founding member of Local 60, the delicatessen-workers union (union card #6). His father had a number of jobs but, through Uncle Nelson, found himself working at New York delis including Lou G. Siegel’s on West 38th Street — the store that Dragoon himself would buy in 1996 to establish a Ben’s beachhead in Manhattan.

A Brooklyn College political science major (minor: English literature), Dragoon was home in Queens after a year’s stint in Indiana with VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and working at two delis when he learned that there was a twice-bankrupt one for sale in Baldwin. At 23, he says, he lacked the confidence to take on the business by himself and so he asked his father to be his partner. There was no question as to whose name would be on the sign. “What kind of a kosher deli would be named Ronnie’s? Ben’s, Sam’s, Harry’s, those are kosher-deli names."

Ben Dragoon was smart and charming and, his son said, “could sell the Brooklyn Bridge to the same person twice.” A year into the business, he bought his father out. Now he was on his own, but ambivalent about whether running a deli was a worthy pursuit for a guy who considered himself more of a professional than a tradesman.

One day, he recalled, “I was short a waiter and I called this college friend who was studying for his PhD. and I asked if he could come down and work. After four or five hours, he pulls me aside and says, ‘You're smarter than this. This is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life?’”

Dragoon answered, “Yes. And I’m going to make it successful.”

After that, he says, “I put my head down. For seven years I didn’t take a day off. I was living at home so every dollar I made I put into the restaurant.” He’d make small improvements to the restrooms, buy new chairs a few at a time. He would work in his kitchen, wash his floor. “People saw what I was doing and they knew I was serious.”

In September, 1975, he hired Cindy Seldes as a waitress and, seven months later, he married her. She proved indispensable to the business and grew their family (son, Josh and daughter, Jaime). “She came in every day at five or six in the morning filling catering orders,” Dragoon says. “To this day, no one can make a platter as fast as Cindy can.”

With his wife overseeing Baldwin, Dragoon opened a second store, in Greenvale (now the flagship) in 1982. Over the next two decades, he opened locations from Carle Place to Boca Raton, Fla.

As the empire expanded, Dragoon looked for new ways to improve. He found a system to provide a unique “shiva coordination service” whereby all the orders for a shiva are consolidated so that the bereaved “don’t wind up getting six orders from two stores on the same day.” If, at the end of the mourning period, there are still unfulfilled orders, Ben’s converts them into gift certificates. “Shivas may be 10 percent of our business,” he says, “but they signal the loss of a customer.”

When Ben’s started out, “the deli was an extension of the synagogue or the JCC [Jewish Community Center], but now I’d say my business is maybe 65 percent Jewish,” he says. Dragoon is strict about adhering to the laws of kashrut, and keeps 18 part-time rabbis on the payroll so that each store is visited every day. (On Sabbath, video cameras in the kitchen record the proceedings and a rabbi reviews the footage on Sunday.)

 Kosher customers like Victor Pasternack of Roslyn appreciate the adherence. Over the past 25 years, he figures he's visited Ben's about three times a week. "The roast chicken, the matzoh-ball soup, the corned beef and pastrami, they are staples in my house … and the potato salad is great."

In Feb., 2020, Dragoon announced that he was going to step back from the business. Then came the pandemic. “There was too much for me to handle,” he says.

The labor exodus cost him two general managers and one counter manager, and as for the supply chain: Oy! “I couldn’t get Hebrew National salami for three months, bologna for six months. Pickles and sauerkraut doubled. I needed a new kettle for making stock — the price had gone from $8,000 to $15,000 and it took eight months.”

Dragoon has always had a soft spot for pastrami and he’s proud to see it delighting a new generation of customers as the “kosher bacon” laid across a plate of avocado toast or the crowning glory on the “Big Ben burger” already saddled with a couple of onion rings. Brisket now gets pressed into panino service and Hungarian goulash gets into the act nestled between two halves of a hoagie roll.

 But there's also a segment of his customer base for whom old-school deli foods are a new tradition. Cynthia Edwards of Oyster Bay recalls the time about 10 years ago when her six-year-old son was down with a bad cold. "I remembered my dad said that when you're sick, you go to the kosher deli for chicken soup," she said. "And so we came to Ben's, and that was it. Now I keep the soup in the freezer in case Everett gets sick, and we are here about once a month."

For the time being, Dragoon considers himself “semiretired, which means I come in at 10, leave at 6.” And, he looks back at the last 50 years with affection and satisfaction. “I never defined success as just about the money,” he said. “I wanted to do something I was passionate about, something stable that could put a roof over my family’s head and provide the best possible education for my children. Ben’s has done that.”