Four nights a week, Mile End Delicatessen in Boerum Hill serves its trademark modern Jewish comfort food — think duck pastrami, oxtail kreplach and red-wine-braised beef brisket — but last month, the 3-year-old noshery began offering something entirely different on Sunday nights: Chinese food.
“One of my earliest memories of food is eating at a Chinese restaurant with my grandmother [on my father’s side],” says Noah Bernamoff, 31, of the inspiration behind the six-course set menu ($35) of Americanized Cantonese classics, like beef and broccoli, alongside Mile End’s own twists, like egg drop soup with liver wontons and smoked chicken leg.
His mother’s side of the family was more religious and served the traditional food that inspired the restaurant and his cookbook “The Mile End Cookbook: Redefining Jewish Comfort Food From Hash to Hamantaschen,” but for his dad’s more secular family, Chinese food, he says, “was our Sunday evening ritual.”
While the city’s traditional kosher restaurants, such as Kosher Deluxe and Abigael’s on Broadway, have long had Asian options, Bernamoff is one of a number of hip Jewish restaurateurs now putting (not necessarily kosher) Chinese on the menu — either as fusion homages or re-creations.
Modern Jewish American bistro Kutsher’s Tribeca recently added a pastrami Reuben egg roll ($9) and Moshe Peking’s spicy chicken bites ($10) to its lineup.
“Both of these dishes are some of our biggest sellers,” says owner Zach Kutsher.
Though Kutsher says there’s a “stereotype” about the tribe’s fondness for chow mein and the like, he admits, “most Jews do like Chinese food.”
His restaurant may relaunch the Sunday-night Chinese meal it briefly offered upon opening in 2011. Until then, it offers Asian specials like duck shumai.
Henry Stimler, the co-owner of
the J (formerly Jezebel), a trendy kosher nightclub and lounge in SoHo, is also thinking of expanding his Chinese repertoire after a tremendously successful Christmas dinner at the restaurant cooked by Eddie Huang, the young Taiwanese-American chef and author of “Fresh Off the Boat.”
“It was tremendously popular,” says Stimler. “Jews love their Chinese food. Seeing the demand, it was kind of like a flash bulb: New York needs a great, cool, kosher Chinese restaurant.”
Stimler’s rabbi, Yaya Wilhelm, agrees: “We like meat and chicken. We like sweet sauces,” he says of the cuisines’ parallels. “The Chinese food doesn’t go that much against the kosher diet.”
Of course, while Chinese food is lacking in dairy, it does often feature pork and shellfish, two no-no’s if you keep kosher. But the tasty forbidden fruit is usually chopped up and hidden.
“I know a lot of people have called it ‘safe traif,’ ” quips Bernamoff. “You look at a bowl of all sorts of stuff fried up together and you’re like, ‘Looks good enough for me.’ ”
Ed Schoenfeld, a Brooklyn-born secular Jew and the owner of Red Farm, a buzzing greenmarket Chinese restaurant in the West Village, says it was more than just the flavors that attracted him to Chinese fare.
“It was familiar, comfortable, delicious — and it was intimidating for me to go into a French restaurant,” he recalls. “My family was a middle-class, intellectual family.”
Schoenfeld dropped out of NYU, at 19 in 1969, to study cooking and work setting up Chinese banquets. In his early 20s, he worked at the city’s first four-star Chinese restaurant, Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan on the Upper East Side. He’s since become one of the city’s reigning Chinese-food experts.
“There’s a Borscht Belt shtick about Jews and Chinese food,” he quips. “My personal joke is that I learned to speak Yiddish in the Chinese restaurant from my customers.”
Meanwhile, at Parm, an Italian-American deli in NoLIta, Sunday night Chinese is one of the restaurant’s most popular specials. The restaurant’s managing partner, Jeff Zalaznick, is Jewish and grew up on the Upper East Side going to Pig Heaven and Shun Lee West at the end of every week with this family.
But, he notes, his partners, chefs Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, had a similar ritual growing up, though neither is Jewish.
Says Zalaznick: “Chinese on Sunday night is a Jewish thing and a New York thing.”
heber@nypost.com