Loading...
1669-43 Social, Society,& Local News 1946-1993 MON NOV 21 1983 ED: FINAL SECTION: FOOD PAGE: lE LENGTH: 34 . 07" LONG ILLUST: color photo: Leonard and Edward Thal SOURCE: LINDA CICERO Herald Food Writer DATELINE: MEMO: EPICURE ON THE BEACH: 40 YEARS OF INDULGENCE What Zabar' s is to New York, Fauchon is to Paris, Peck is to Milan and Harrod' s is to London, Epicure is to Miami Beach. When your gastronomic soul is in need of indulging, Epicure is where you go. Shopping at Epicure is also like having your own Jewish grandmother to cook and market for you. So who else is going to get you (and 500 other people) a fresh turkey from the Eastern Shore for your Thanksgiving dinner, cook it and stuff it, and even bake up a pumpkin pie for you, a pumpkin pie that has never seen the inside of a freezer and is full of only the best ingredients, like whipping cream and freshly grated nutmeg? Sure, if Eddie Thal hadn 't suffered from sinus trouble, Epicure might be in Philadelphia or Newark or Chester, Pa. We might never have tasted Mama Jennie ' s cabbage soup, from a recipe she brought with her from Russia, or her noodle pudding or beet borscht. We might have to go without fresh raspberries in November or settle for a frozen turkey this Thanksgiving. We might have to make our own brisket and latkes and honey cakes for Hanukkah because we couldn 't trust anyone else to make them for us. But luckily for us, Eddie Thal couldn't take the cold. So 40 years ago he abandoned the Northeast for Miami Beach, and took over a butcher shop the Army Air Corps had commandeered during the war years. He opened the familiar food market on Alton Road, which has become the grande dame of South Florida' s gourmet food shops, with little more than a stove he had pirated from his home kitchen. Even from such a simple beginning, food at Epicure has always been much more than simply something to eat. It is a place where the taste buds are indulged, where extravagance is encouraged and whims are nourished. In a part of town where a lot of people live on tight budgets, price never has been an object. Eddie Thal, who built a family empir a e where brothers and nephews and grandsons and granddaughters all labor now, never set out to compete with grocery stores. "I figured let the big guys corner the prices and I ' ll corner the quality, " grouses 75- year-old Thal, who still is very much involved in the day-to- day operations. Of course, over the years Epicure has become a pretty big guy, itself. Besides the 11 family members on the payroll, including brother Leonard, 70, who is the cooking genius, Leonard' s son Harry, who is the baker, brother Sidney, who handles the books and brother Mervyn who runs the meat division, there are 140 employes. Each year they turn out 10, 000 gallons of chicken soup, 15, 000 pounds of kugel, 20, 000 pounds of noodle pudding, 100, 000 pieces of gefilte fish, 2 ,000 roast turkeys and 10, 000 Black-out Cakes (an Epicure special -- dark chocolate cake, filled with dark chocolate pudding, frosted with dark chocolate and dusted with cocoa) . In four decades of doing business, Epicure has catered to the famous and the infamous, to the impoverished elderly who live in the neighborhood and come in every day for a hot meal to take home, to the glitzy set who come in when the spirit beckons to buy champagne and Beluga, to the customers who drive in from miles away simply because they like the personalized service and the incredible variety of foods (there are more than 1, 000 American gourmet foods alone, specialties from every state in the union, such as maple syrup from Vermont, fresh chanterelles from North Dakota and a black walnut cake from South Carolina) . There was Meyer Lansky, who asked Harry Thal (Eddie ' s nephew) to break the rules and let him eat his stuffed veal breast in a back room, since he knew he couldn 't take it home -- where his wife was keeping him on a strict diet. There was Harry Truman, who had them send barbecued baby back ribs to him in Key West. And Jimmy Hoffa, who was fond of the potato kugel, and Winston Churchill who visited Miami Beach right after World War II and couldn' t get enough roast beef, he 'd gone without it for so long. When John Kennedy' s yacht was moored nearby on North Bay Road, soon after he'd become President, Harry Thal got a speeding ticket because the chef had called him with a frantic request for mixers and hors d'oeuvres for the cocktail crowd (the policeman was impressed, but still gave Harry the ticket) . When Richard Nixon was staying on Key Biscayne, he ordered groceries from Epicure, continuing the presidential treatment. The Thals are confident that if Mr. Reagan ever comes to the beach, he ' ll patronize them too. After all, the Secret Service knows the place well. Stars come out at Epicure, too. When Jackie Gleason is in the mood for pot roast, sister-in-law June Taylor phones Epicure, and the word is that the Great One can go for second and third helpings. The BeeGees are regular customers; so is Richard Burton when he ' s in town. When Paul Newman was across the street filming "An Absence of Malice" he ate corned beef on rye from Epicure, and came over later to thank the Thals personally. "You 've got a real nice place here, " he pronounced after a stroll through the aisles. The cashiers swooned, but Eddie Thal wasn't all that impressed. "Walter Matthau was much nicer. He stopped and signed autographs. " Gloria Simmons isn' t famous or even nearly so. She ' s an art student and a secretary. She used to shop at Epicure with her mother when she was a little girl, and now, 20 years later, she drives in from Coral Gables regularly to do her own shopping. "I could just get my groceries at the chain store five blocks from my house, but it wouldn' t be the same. " She wants a pineapple to serve the next day, and so asks Epicure produce buyer Vincent Battaglia to choose one for her. Battaglia, 73, has 60 years experience in produce, and knows what makes a good pineapple. And if he had any doubts he could always call in Joe Shafer, the other produce man, who has put in the same number of years -- 60 -- in the fruit and vegetable business. "It ' s our people who make the difference here, " says Epicure manager Mitchell Thal (he ' s Eddie ' s grandson) . "In fact, that ' s one of the greatest fears I have for the future, that we won' t be able to replace some of the people here when they retire. They are artists who practice dying skills. Thankfully, they are willing to teach the young, but their experience is a precious commodity. " The two men who make the fruit and delicacy gift baskets, for example, have 80 years of combined experience. In the commissary, employes cook up the 60 different prepared food items that are available every day (everything from fettuccine with ham salad ($2 . 95) to potato latkes (75 cents) to sliced steak with fresh mushrooms and peppers in wine sauce -- and that doesn' t include the large variety of made-on-the- premises gourmet frozen dinners, everything from arroz con pollo to Irish lamb stew -- or the 300 jar items they put up, such as homemade salad dressings and cabbage soup) . They can accomplish all that because the average employe has been with the company 25 years. Then there are the deli men and the butchers, who will custom cut anything, who handle 40, 000 pounds of beef a week (the Thals also own their own wholesale meat company to insure they get prime meats) , who age the steaks for 2 to 3 weeks and always have a crown roast on hand, who can tell by looking at a piece of meat just how long it has to cook and how many it will serve. Critics of Miami Beach, and particularly South Beach, say it is dying. But at Epicure the aisles are crowded and business has never been better. "People aren 't crazy, " says Mitchel Thal . "They' re not going to come in here and pay more unless there ' s something special about our store. And that is that things taste better, because we won' t let them taste any other way, and the people here, from the cashiers to the cooks, have a sense of pride in their work. " The Thals opened up their recipe book -- which includes many recipes from their mother -- to share with South Florida cooks in time for Thanksgiving and Hanukkah. ADDED TERMS: profile mb history END OF DOCUMENT.