Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

I'm Jesse Thorn, it's Bullseye.

If you have a computer or phone in front of you, do me a favor.

Do a web search for the term dairy restaurant.

A dairy restaurant for the record is a kind of kosher restaurant that serves, well, dairy

for starters, other stuff too, but no meat.

Many observant Jews avoid mixing meat and milk to keep kosher, so a dairy restaurant

serves a really useful purpose.

But like I said, look up the term on the web.

If you're looking for a history on those places, what kind of food they served, you won't

find much.

Instead you'll see maybe a few listings for restaurants in your area, some travel guides,

but no Wikipedia page, no dictionary definition.

It's almost like they aren't really a thing, or that they're lost a time, but they are

a thing, or were at least.

There used to be a bunch of them in New York City and in other places where first generation

Jewish immigrants came to the US, but cities change, people change, restaurants come, restaurants

go.

Ben Catcher, the cartoonist behind the wonderful, brilliant strip, Julius Kineppel real estate

photographer, remembers them.

He misses them, and he talks about those places in his newest book, The Dairy Restaurant.

It's an illustrated history of dairy restaurants, what they served, what role they played, and

...