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
The three Russ daughters eventually took over the business with their husbands, though Ida (1914-2001), the rebellious middle child, according to Federman, left and opened her own appetizing shop, Ida’s, in Massapequa, Long Island. She later closed the shop and became an antiques dealer. She married twice and had a son and a daughter.
The eldest daughter, Hattie (1913-2014), was married to Murray and they had a son and a daughter, five grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren. The couple, along with the youngest Russ daughter, Anne (1921-2018), and her husband Herbert, ran Russ & Daughters until 1979.
Hattie and Anne are featured in the 2014 documentary The Sturgeon Queens that tells the Russ & Daughters story through interviews with family members, famous fans (Maggie Gyllenhall, Ruth Bader Ginsberg) and loyal customers who have been frequenting the shop for decades.
Anne (1921-2018) and Herbert had three children, Tara (Josh Russ Tupper’s mother), Mark (Federman’s father), and Hope.
“I was scared of my grandmother until I was probably in my 20s,” admits Federman. “She was not a warm and fuzzy person…. I didn’t really come to appreciate her until I was older. It really wasn’t until I came into Russ & Daughters and decided that this was my path, that it gave me a lot of perspective about her,” she recalls.
Federman acknowledges that she had advantages that her grandmother did not. “It was my choice to come back to Russ & Daughters, whereas for her, she had no choice. College was not an option for her. Russ & Daughters was not an option for her. It was just what the family did and that was what she was expected to do,” she says.
“I had a lot of compassion for her once I realized that,” she continues, remembering how proud Anne was of her and Josh when they took over the company. “I think that was really validating for her.”
The Third Generation: Mark and Maria Federman
“My dad was born on Ludlow Street above a paper warehouse, but at some point the family moved out to Far Rockaway, Queens,” says Federman. “That’s where my dad grew up.” During time off from school, the third generation kids helped out at the store but were ultimately expected to go to college and become professionals.
Her father Mark went to Georgetown and practiced law. He met his wife Maria, a research chemist, through a lawyer friend who was dating Maria’s sister. Originally from Colombia, Maria, came to New York in the early ‘70s to work at a research lab. The couple married and first lived in Cobble Hill before moving to Park Slope when Federman was four months old. The family lived on Plaza Street for four years and moved to 1st Street in 1981 where Mark and Maria still live.
Federman and her older brother Noah attended PS 321 and went on to Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights for middle school. Federman remained at Saint Ann’s for high school and Noah went to Stuyvesant.
“I very much had a Park Slope childhood,” Federman fondly recalls. “I did the after-school programs at CBE [Congregation Beth Elohim]. My piano teacher was in Park Slope, but when she moved to Ditmas Park my brother and I would ride our bikes around Prospect Park to go to piano classes, and then we’d ride along the other half to get home.” The siblings spent lots of time at the park and took tennis classes at the Parade Ground.
Like their father, Federman and her brother worked at Russ & Daughters during weekends and holidays, which Federman enjoyed. “One of my earliest memories was when I was four or five and I would wait for the delivery guys to come,” she reminisces. “They’d bring their deliveries in on a hand truck, and I would climb up on top of the hand truck and sit on sacks of potatoes or onions, like it was my chariot, and I would direct them to the kitchen. I really thought I was being helpful…. I think I always wanted to be in the mix.”
She enjoyed the conviviality in the shop and the rapport between the employees and regular customers. “I grew up thinking that when you go into a shop, you hug and kiss the shopkeeper, you trade stories, you tell jokes… I didn’t understand that was not normal. You don’t get that at Duane Reade!”
The energy of the store made her appreciate and connect with the customers. “I understood from a very young age the special way this shop made people feel,” she continues. “I understood it wasn’t just a food shop, there was something more.”
The Fourth Generation: Niki Russ Federman & Josh Russ Tupper
Federman studied political science at Amherst College in the mid ‘90s. She hoped to work for the foreign service and become an ambassador. She loves to travel and is fluent in Spanish, French, and Japanese. After graduating in 1999, she moved to San Francisco. “I wanted to go somewhere new,” she says. She worked as an executive assistant for the director of SF MoMA, “[It had] nothing to do with international relations or the family business. It was a great experience.”
She returned to NYC in 2001 and helped her parents at the shop behind the scenes. “I was very clear with my father that it was just temporary. I said I’ll help you with some special projects,” which included redesigning the website and launching e-commerce.
Just a few months after her return, Mark took his daughter’s presence “as his exit strategy,” she recalls. “He had not made it known before that he was burnt out and wanted to retire,” she notes. He told her she could take over the business or he would sell it. Federman was taken off guard. Her parents had never pressured her into the family business before, and being in her early 20’s, she was not ready to take up the torch.
“I needed to step away,” she says. “My escape was business school.” Federman wrote an essay based on Russ & Daughters for her application. “I actually wrote my whole business school essay about being part of this fourth generation family business and how I was going to grow it and expand it…she recalls. “The irony is I wrote that knowing that it would make a compelling essay, not because I thought at the time that I would actually do it.” She was accepted to Yale School of Management and moved to New Haven with her boyfriend Christopher, who is now her husband.
While she was in Connecticut, her cousin Josh, formerly a chemical engineer, stepped in at Russ & Daughters and began to learn the business from the ground up.
Over in New Haven, things began to unravel. “Pretty quickly it became very clear to me, I’m not here to get an MBA. I did this as an escape,” Federman recalls. She left business school after one semester but stayed in New Haven because Christopher had a great job at the Institute for Neurodegenerative Disorders. He is now a psychoanalyst. She stuck it out for two years, working odd jobs and figuring out her future.
“It turned out to be exactly what I needed,” she recalls. “The space and the distance really freed me up to contemplate Russ & Daughters for myself….. My whole perspective on it totally flipped…. I previously thought if I ended up doing what my great grandparents, grandparents, and parents did, then in a way I was a failure, because we live in such an individualistic society, so I [felt] I had to do my own thing,” she says.
She eventually realized that being part of Russ & Daughters is “actually something special.” It dawned on her that the family business did not “need to be stagnant…. I could grow it,” Federman says. “I could innovate and put my own stamp on it. It all became much more exciting to me and that’s when I made my decision to come back.”
In 2006, Federman returned to NYC and to Russ & Daughters, where Josh had already been working for three years. The pair took the reins with Josh overseeing operations and finances and Federman handling human resources, communications, and marketing. “There’s a lot of overlap,” Federman notes. “We’re very involved, both front-facing and behind the scenes.” Under their leadership, the company has expanded to four locations with 150 employees, retail, shipping, and catering.
They opened Russ & Daughters Cafe at 127 Orchard Street in 2014 – the centennial of the first store. “That was a big game changer that reinvigorated the business and brand,” Federman says.
In 2015, they expanded to Brooklyn. “For a hundred years we were doing everything out of this tiny space [the East Houston location] and that was becoming untenable.” They opened their first 5,000-square-foot production space in Bushwick, but quickly outgrew it.
Shortly after moving to Bushwick, Federman ran into Hank Gutman, a lawyer who was also a family friend, a long-time Russ & Daughters customer and champion. He had just become the chair of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation and insisted that Federman and Josh check out the site’s new Building 77.
“I was immediately struck by the feeling of being in a place with such an important part of New York history that was still alive,” Federman recalls of their initial visit. “The Navy Yard has been an active shipyard for 200 years…. I just felt this synergy and I thought this is what people feel when they come into Russ & Daughter’s, they’re tapping into living history. That felt really special.” They signed a lease, built out the space, and moved in in 2018, leaving the Bushwick facility behind.
Russ & Daughters Brooklyn is open daily to the public and the bakery features a wall of windows where customers can see the team making bagels, babka, black & white cookies, and more. There is a retail counter so Brooklyn-based Russ & Daughters fans can get their fix without leaving the borough (or they can order delivery in Brooklyn). The offices and nationwide shipping operations are also located at the 18,000-square-foot facility.
The Brooklyn location became a life-saver during the Covid pandemic. The staff was able to spread out in the vast space and the business stayed open as an essential food business. “We were not only making and shipping food to people in lockdown, we were also making thousands of deliveries to local hospitals, senior centers throughout the city…. This was the biggest space and biggest build-out we had ever done, and we could not have predicted that it would have become so essential.” Federman notes that Covid was not the first pandemic that Russ & Daughters has endured. Joel worked through the influenza pandemic of 1918. “It gave me such perspective to be able to look back and know that each generation of my family has endured… the world wars, the Depression, 9/11.”
Federman remembers when signing the lease at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, she and Josh half joked about wanting a 100-year lease. “We’re Russ & Daughters. We do things to last and we want to be around for another 100 years.”
Federman lists some of her favorite places in Park Slope.
al di là Trattoria – The perfect neighborhood restaurant for more than 25 years and still going strong!
Artist & Craftsman Supply – I’m always happy to have an excuse to shop for art supplies there (also find great gifts there too).
Brooklyn Botanic Garden – Played there as a kid and got married there as an adult.
Community Bookstore – Park Slope is not Park Slope to me without Community Bookstore. I can’t wait for the Russ & Daughters cookbook, Russ & Daughters: A Hundred Years of Appetizing, to be on the shelves there next September!
Gasworks Pottery – My kids have done ceramics camps there. Just walking in there makes me feel calm and I love seeing the focus of everyone at the wheel.
L’Albero Dei Gelati – The owners Monia and Alessandro always use the best ingredients. Their daughter and my son are at school together, which is so sweet (pun intended).
Lefrak Center at Lakeside in Prospect Park – I skated there as a kid when it was still a very humble rink.
Petite Dumpling – Excellent handmade dumplings. This is one restaurant everyone in my family can always agree on.
Ride Brooklyn –My husband is a cyclist and worked as a bike mechanic for five years when he was younger. The staff are nice and knowledgeable.
Tarzian Hardware – I went there a lot as a kid because my friend Sheila’s mom, Catherine, worked there. Now I go there quite often with my son so he can pick up “building supplies” for his various creations.
Un Posto Italiano – I have been coming here since it started as the tiniest of tiny storefronts where Antonio, the owner, had just enough room for his pasta table to make and cut fresh pasta in front of you. Now he and his wife have a beautiful space on Garfield. I love sitting down for a coffee and a bite.
The Next Generation: ???
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