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JANUARY 5, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT



YOU SHOULD KNOW ...

Lauren Biederman
Sasha Rogelberg | Staff Writer
Photo by Gab Bonghi
I n the week between Christmas and New Years — a particularly
busy week for Biederman’s Specialty Foods — owner Lauren
Biederman processed between 200-300 pounds of smoked fish,
but she still isn’t sick of the stuff.

For her New Year’s Eve meal, she dined on fondue, caviar and the
requisite champagne, and for brunch the next day, a bagel spread
with her choice of Scottish salmon or pastrami lox or whitefish salad,
topped off with trout roe.

“Sounds pretty perfect to me,” Biederman said.

Biederman’s Specialty Foods will mark its second birthday on Jan.

15. The shop on Christian Street, despite its home in Philadelphia’s
Italian Market, is undeniably Jewish: Designed after New York’s
appetizing stores, Biederman’s serves schools of smoked fish, from
the classic Nova and kippered salmon
to Scandinavian spins such as vodka
dill gravlax.

Beyond their fileted fare, Biederman
serves a swath of caviar — though
the true caviar from a sturgeon is not
kosher — as well as other specialty
goods, such as tinned fish, Kaplan’s
New Model Bakery bagels and New
York’s Seed + Mill halvah.

Biederman, 27 and a Queen Village
resident, grew up with Jewish appetiz-
ing stores ingrained in her childhood.

Hailing from Killington, Vermont, she
would frequent the tri-state area, visit-
ing appetizing stories in Bridgeport
and Fairfield, Connecticut, where her
grandmother is from, in addition to
the myriad appetizing stores in New
York, a result of the Eastern European
immigrants, with deep cultural roots of
preserving fish, who settled there.

“​​My family, we would go into New
York City all the time when I was a kid,”
Biederman said. “For Christmas, we’d
do dim sum in Chinatown and then
appetizers the next day.”
Biederman shied away from calling
Biederman’s an appetizing store
because she was worried that few
people would recognize the homage
or understand what she was selling.

But the location of the store at 824
Christian St. transports the shop to
a feeling that Biederman’s New York
ancestors may have experienced a
century ago.

“The Italian market, to me, is one of
the more special places in the world,”
Biederman said.

“Most of these businesses are 100
years old, third-generation families are
operating them — or fourth gener-
ation maybe — and it’s been pretty
nice,” she continued. “I do feel like
the Italian Market embraces lots of
different cultures now, more than
just Italian food. Obviously, you have
tons of Mexican food; there’s tons of
Vietnamese food or spice shops.”
The community there has welcomed
Biederman’s, which, as a new company,
is continuing the specialty food tradi-
tion defined by the neighborhood.

Biederman has also spent almost half
her life in food service, adding to her
pedigree. At 15, she began busing and
hosting at Three Tomatoes Trattoria,
an Italian joint with a Jewish owner that
her family frequented throughout her
childhood. From there, she worked at a steak-
house in Burlington, then a nightclub
and later a French restaurant, before
going to the University of Vermont.

Biederman never formally studied
hospitality or the culinary arts.

Instead, she moved to Philadelphia,
attracted by the city’s food scene,
and continued her front-of-house work
at Osteria and Zahav. Her work as a
waitress only grew her love of food.

“It’s a very boring job if you don’t
care about the food a lot,” she said.

“And it’s a lot more fulfilling if you do
care about those things and if you
have that same respect for the back
of house and for the people who are
actually doing the cooking.”
By the time Biederman was thinking
about moving on, she became inter-
ested in opening a specialty food shop,
excited by the idea of selling what she
loved to eat. Specialty stores were also
having a moment of popularity, with
customers able to buy unique foods
they could cook at home during the
pandemic. But the time of the store’s
opening was precarious: January 2021
marked a spike in COVID cases.

When the store first opened, only
three people were allowed to enter at
a time, creating a line down the block,
adding to Biederman’s image as a
popular store. But with no more COVID
restrictions at the store, the line out
the door at Biederman’s is still there,
sometimes. The store now has three full-time
workers, and Biederman said the
holiday season was busy.

“I was nervous that I wasn’t getting
the word out there fast enough,”
Biederman said. “But it seemed to
have worked.” ■
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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