Gold Manor, the Broadway Central Hotel, Riverside Plaza. The popular simchah halls of the ’60s, with their standard chicken and kishke menu, might have faded out of fashion, but after four decades, Reb Yosef Pruzansky is still serving up fancy fare, even as he waxes nostalgic for the days the family business worked out of the Mirrer Yeshivah’s kitchen.
There is an episode on one of the vintage Marvelous Middos Machine albums in which the protagonist is trapped in a time machine and lands at a late 1960s Brooklyn chasunah. In that fictional account vintage 1968 music plays in the background — “Romemu Hashem Romemu” and new hit “Shmelke’s Niggun.” Of course we don’t learn who catered the wedding but if I had to guess … I would choose the Pruzansky Brothers. It just makes sense.
If you only see caterers on the job you imagine them as rushed even frantic. Yet meeting Reb Yosef Pruzansky the veteran owner of Pruzansky Brothers catering I wonder if he’s even capable of stress. He welcomes me with an unhurried air in suspenders and shirtsleeves his demeanor and accent vintage Brooklyn.
“I hope you didn’t come here for nothing” he offers smiling “and that you find this stuff interesting. Listen we’re caterers not writers.”
Like the man himself his story is solidly rooted. It starts with the commitment to authentic Yiddishkeit so rare in the early 1900s. It’s a tale — like so many others — that begins with a father who wouldn’t bow down.
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