we MUST know each other....I worked at Geoff's Sandwich Shop as well as Lupo's Headbreak Hotel,the Living Room, Brandywine's and Tortilla Flats....Fourth,Fifth, Methyl,up and down Hope Street, Transit St.,Wayland Square....jeezus...and I spent thousands of hours BS'ng in Davis Delicatessen...old man Davis would utter a Jewish epithet when I'd walk in and tell his customers.."watch out...the crazy goyim is here!!!"...
You went to Davis, at 721 Hope St., almost as much for the schmoozing as the food. It was like a repertory theater.
The characters were Mr. Davis, his daughter Lori, her husband, Mark Glazer, and employee Nate Anthony. There was a definite, if playful, edge in the air, certainly if Mr. Davis was on hand. Like, if my order was tiny, he might say, “For this I had to come to work?”
He regularly asked how I was handicapping an election, and he was quick to offer his political views. He disliked the Kennedys. And don’t even mention Al Sharpton.
He’s 88 now, and God bless him.
It was a quirky place. When you were checking out, one person – say, Mark – would call out the price of each item. Someone else – say, Mr. Davis – would tote them up on an old-fashioned adding machine.
I wasn’t around when the business began in 1906, but I can tell you that right to the end, in 2020, they took no credit cards.
Some things did change. When you walked in the store years ago, you had to take a number, a paper slip from a dispenser. Eventually, they stopped doing that. But I recall those days well because Lori once took a Number 1 slip and crafted it into a souvenir lifetime pass for me.
I loved the glistening lox, which my friend Andy Miller says they’d cut for him so thin it had only one side.
I’d often see Jerry Kapstein, the Red Sox senior adviser who later ran for lieutenant governor, standing near the counter, waiting for his lox order. One day I whipped out my iPhone to take his picture, but, no, he snapped that I was violating his privacy.
Most of the people you’d see in there were Jewish, of course, but one time I brought in Sheldon Whitehouse, now the U.S. senator, and they made him a bagel and cream cheese, and he loved it.