Russ & Daughters: "We Want to Be Around for Another 100 Years"
Co-owner Niki Russ Federman talks about the iconic family business, slicing salmon, and life in the Slope
Improving on a classic is no easy task – especially when it’s Russ & Daughters, an NYC institution – but that’s exactly what Park Slope native Niki Russ Federman did when, along with her cousin, Josh Russ Tupper, she took over the family-run business in the early 2000s.
The pair have taken the celebrated Lower East Side appetizing shop and expanded it to three additional locations including Russ & Daughters Brooklyn, their biggest space yet. Opened in 2018 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, it features a retail counter, bakery, nationwide shipping facility, and production space. “After 100 years, Russ & Daughters crossed the East River and we’re in Brooklyn,” Federman said on a recent morning at the Navy Yard location. She notes that the company’s founder, her great grandfather Joel Russ, lived on Myrtle Avenue – just two blocks away from where we were sitting – when he first arrived in America in 1907. That’s where the story of Russ & Daughters began four generations ago.
The First Generation: Joel Russ
Joel Russ immigrated to New York from the town of Strzyzow in southern Poland. He stayed with his sister Channah in Brooklyn and helped her husband sell schmaltz herring to the large Jewish population in the Lower East Side.
“Schmaltz herring is a fatty herring cured with salt and oil,” Federman explains. “It’s what my great grandfather started selling in a barrel. Flavor-wise, it’s like a giant anchovy, that salty, fatty, umami flavor.”
Today at Russ & Daughters Cafe on Orchard Street, customers can indulge in Schmaltz & a Shot, pieces of schmaltz herring with boiled potato, raw onion and a shot of vodka. “It’s so old school but it’s new school,” Federman muses.
In seven years, Joel saved up and purchased a pushcart to sell his wares and in 1914 opened his first brick-and-mortar appetizing shop on Orchard Street. Appetizing is a Jewish food tradition that adheres to Jewish dietary laws restricting meat and dairy products from being sold in the same venue. Appetizing stores sell smoked fish, cream cheeses, salads, and cold appetizers (foods eaten with bagels) while delicatessens sell cured and pickled meats. Today, Russ & Daughters is one of the last remaining appetizing shops in NYC.
In 1920, Joel moved his shop around the corner to 179 East Houston Street where it still stands 104 years later!
Joel and his wife Bella had three daughters, Hattie, Ida, and Anne, who started working at the shop in their teens. In 1933, Joel changed the name of the shop – which had been called J. Russ National Appetizing or Russ’s Cut Rate Appetizing – to the much catchier and controversial Russ & Daughters, the first business in America to include “& Daughters” in its name.
“I know on some level he wasn’t a feminist. If he had a son, it would have been Russ & Son,” notes Federman, “but on another level, he must have been…because he still took the very bold step to give it that name knowing there were people who couldn’t understand why he would do that. Some people thought that he took on a partner [named] Mr. Daughters,” she adds. And it wasn’t just in name – Joel recognized his daughters’ hard work by making them partners in the business.
Joel passed away in 1961, before Federman was born, but according to family lore, her great grandfather was “not a pleasant person.” He was impatient and “customer service was not in his lingo,” she says. Despite his surly nature, he launched an iconic New York business with a devoted following.
The Second Generation: Hattie, Ida, and Anne
