Growing up, restaurateur Andy Kalish associated two smells with Friday nights: his grandmother's chicken soup and mothballs in his grandfather's closet. Kalish's grandparents, Sam and Gertie, were both immigrants — from Romania and Glasgow-by-way-of-Romania, respectively — who had settled in the Dexter-Davidson corridor of Detroit, a historically Jewish neighborhood.
There, Kalish's childhood was steeped with traditional Ashkenazi food, from lavish kiddush tables packed with bagels and lox to Gertie's home-cooked Friday dinners, often served with platters of pickled herring, which Kalish would make wiggle by gently bumping the leg of the table with his knee.
