Alan Kaufman has not met a vegetable he wouldn’t like to pickle. In his shop in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, surrounded by dozens of barrels filled with everything from button mushrooms to pineapple, the larger-than-life owner of The Pickle Guys is trying to keep the ways of Old New York alive.

His is the last kosher pickle store in an area that once had so many it was nicknamed the ‘pickle district.’ His store is old school, he banters with customers who’ve been coming in for years, giving them tasters of his newer pickles before packing them the same thing they buy every time.

The store is in an area that was once very Jewish. As new immigrants from Eastern Europe arrived on Ellis Island, they made their way up the island of Manhattan, finding an unloved spot where there were plenty of cheap apartments. With them, they brought little pieces of the Old Country, which for many, was pickles.

It's a story that’s a foundational part of New York’s Jewish history, and which helped make pickles as essential a part of the Jewish diet as the pastrami (salt beef) sandwich or knish. Over the last 100 years, many of these Jews assimilated, married out and left the busy dirty streets of Lower Manhattan for the suburbs.
Now, like many of the old Jewish areas of New York, the Lower East Side has been gentrified beyond the point of parody, with $10 artisanal rice pudding and fancy trinket stores.

But on the corner of Grand and Essex, just down the street from Katz’s deli, Alan makes pickles the exact same way they did more than a hundred years ago; just a barrel, some brine, and a few spices.
And although, since the early 1900s the number of pickle stores may have massively shrunk, the variety of pickles has only increased. When Alan started his business in the 1980s, it was with only a few barrels of cucumbers.

Long range: the list of pickle types is extensive

Fast forward to today and those barrels are filled with more than 40 different products including watermelon, Brussels sprouts, and herring. The pickles are all fermented for different amounts of time, softer fruits and veg like pineapples, mango, or tomatoes just need a few days, whereas the big classic cucumbers can be pickled for weeks.
Everything Alan makes has been rabbinically supervised to keep his kosher status, something he says he’ll never give up, partially to serve his long time observant customers, and partially to pay tribute to the heritage of pickle making in the area. 

The customer base for The Pickle Guys extends far wider than Lower East Side Jews — Alan ships his wares all over America, as far afield as Alaska and Hawaii. A result, likely because of the recent pickling renaissance the USA has seen over the last few years — with dedicated pickle-fests popping up all over the country serving everything from pickle ice lollies to pickle beers to giant pickle glasses for cocktails. But The Pickle Guys aren’t playing into the fads, they’re simply making good old-fashioned pickles which is why Alan says they’ve stayed open for as long as they have.

He tells me, "We sell traditional stuff. Me personally, I’ve served three generations of the save family. I’ve given their grandfather pickles and I’ll probably serve their children too.”

“I see this place like a live museum, we still do everything by hand, we don’t use machines. All the pickles are packed by hand, inspected, anything that’s no good we toss, so you just get the best.”

All of Alan’s produce is sourced from as close as he can find it. The 2400lbs of small cucumbers he gets a week come from his cucumber broker in Upstate New York in the summer and from in Florida over the winter months.
Around Pesach, Alan handgrates hundreds of kilos of fresh horseradish, which Jews bring to Seders all over the country. It’s just one of the ways, he’s trying to keep a slice of Old New York alive. He says he hopes to be around for “another 100 years, because once we close, there’ll never be anything like this again.”

The Pickle Guys