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February 27, 2004/Adar 5 5764, Vol. 56, No. 23
All in good taste
Chompie's celebrates 25 years in Phoenix
JENNIFER GOLDBERG
Staff Writer
Lou Borenstein, left, owner of Chompie's Restaurants, and his sons Neal, center, and Mark, display some of the restaurant's offerings at the original location in 1979.
Photo courtesy of Chompie's
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For days, well-wishers, passersby and curious onlookers had come to the back door of the little strip-mall bagel shop at 32nd Street and Shea Boulevard in Phoenix. Chompie's was not yet open to the public, but they came anyway: transplanted New Yorkers, students from nearby Shadow Mountain High School and other people drawn by the luscious smell of baking bread. Some wanted a taste of the goods, and some came to offer advice. Some came simply to learn what a bagel was.
On Feb. 14, 1979, Chompie's opened its doors and opened a new chapter in Valley of the Sun cuisine. The owners, Lovey and Lou Borenstein of Phoenix, sought to bring to town something that they felt the city didn't have: fresh, authentic, New York-style bagels. Like many Valley residents, the Borensteins began as visitors.
"We came out here, and it was gorgeous," Lovey Borenstein recalls. "Before I know it, we're buying a house and looking at stores and thinking about what we can do here."
The Borensteins, who were living in Queens, N.Y., got a tip from a friend that anyone who wanted a bagel in Phoenix was reduced to eating Lender's from the grocery store. Meanwhile, the Borensteins had lots of baking experience - both Lovey and Lou Borenstein's families were bakers, while Mark, the middle child and oldest son of the Borensteins, had bagel-baking experience at several restaurants in New York. Also, Lovey had a reputation as an outstanding family cook.
"Mom could cook anything," says Wendy Borenstein Tucker, the daughter and oldest child of the Borensteins. "She was an amazing cook, my grandmothers were awesome cooks, and we have great family recipes from the past, which we adopted at Chompie's."
In 1978, the entire Borenstein family packed up and made the cross-country trip to Phoenix, including Lovey and Lou; their sons, Mark and Neal; Tucker and her then-husband; and all four of Lovey and Lou's parents.
The name for the restaurant comes from Neal Borenstein's childhood nickname.
"Growing up, Neal was known as The Chomper, because of how he loved to eat," says Tucker. "Whatever he had to eat, he'd just take a good bite out of it."
The original Chompie's menu was small: bagels and cream cheese and various salads.
"We started out with about eight different kinds of cream cheese," says Lovey, "a chive, a veggie, a lox spread, maybe a honey raisin walnut, plain. ...Then we had the whitefish salad, the baked salmon salad, tuna salad, egg salad. We had a limited amount of things."
Tucker says, "I gained about nine pounds the week before we opened, just from tasting all the bagels and things we were trying to prepare."
On that first day, "we didn't know what was going to happen," says Tucker. "We didn't know how business would be, and we were all scared." It quickly became apparent that Chompie's would have to educate the public to the nuances of New York Jewish cuisine.
"When we opened our doors, we had people who would come in and they didn't know what bagels were. They would say, 'Can I have one of those chocolate donuts over there?' and they were pointing to a pumpernickel bagel. It was hysterical," Tucker recalls. Nevertheless, the first day was a success: Business was good, and late in the day, a friend of the Borenstein family came into the store with approximately 40 people and bought up everything that was left.
The customers who were familiar with the type of food Chompie's served were generally delighted to find old favorites so far from home. Borenstein recalls one memorable day when a New York native discovered the restaurant.
"It was a tearful, memorable thing," she says. "There was this poor guy who lived in Arizona for 30 years, and he came in one day and he was looking at the board, and he said, 'You make egg creams? You make egg creams and you use Fox's U-Bet chocolate syrup? I've been out of New York 30 years, and I haven't had an egg cream in 30 years!' He actually sat down on the floor and started to cry. He actually was bawling. I went in the back and made him a big frothy chocolate egg cream."
Over the next several years, Chompie's expanded at its original location until it became too large for the strip mall it was housed in. Chompie's moved into its location at 32nd Street and Greenway Road in Phoenix approximately 11 years ago. The year after that, a second location opened at 92nd Street and Shea Boulevard in Scottsdale. The newest Chompie's, located at 1160 E. University Drive in Tempe, recently celebrated its fifth anniversary.
As the business expanded, so did the menu. From bagels and cream cheese, salads and a little kitchen for making a few breakfast items, Chompie's now offers an enormous menu of soups, salads, sandwiches, platters, desserts, appetizers, breakfast dishes and more. The strong influence of family ties on the business is quickly apparent: Many dishes are named after various family and extended family members. Customer favorites are the corned beef Reuben sandwich, chicken in a pot dinner, stuffed cabbage, chicken matzo ball soup, blintzes, knishes and cheesecake. Chompie's food has won accolades from various press outlets, including "Best Sandwich" in 2001 and "Best Bagels" in 2000 from the Phoenix New Times, "Biggest Corned Beef Sandwich" and "Most Delish Knish" in the Jewish News' 2002 Best of Jewish Phoenix, and "Best Corned Beef Sandwich," "Best Knish," and "Best Deli Platter," and "Best Matzo Ball Soup" in the Jewish News' 2003 Best of Jewish Phoenix. Phoenix Magazine has cited Chompie's cheesecake as rivaling cheesecake in New York.
Offering "25 kinds of cheesecake is not the answer to good cheesecake," says Borenstein. "Good cheesecake is making a few kinds" and making them well.
Chompie's expanded into catering not long after the business began.
"When we first opened our doors, we didn't know we were going to be doing catering," says Tucker. "There was a demand for it."
A favorite with catering customers is the giant bagel, a tire-sized version of the original Chompie's bagel layered with various toppings. Chompie's now does hot and cold catering for functions of various sizes, including synagogue events, b'nai mitzvah, corporate affairs and more. They also produce Shabbat meals to go and family-style meals for Hanukkah, Rosh Hashana and Passover.
Despite the success of Chompie's, the business has had its share of obstacles to overcome. When the Borensteins arrived in Phoenix, they discovered a city in which the Jewish community was smaller and less well-received than it is today.
"We weren't exactly welcomed," Borenstein recalls. "We faced our share of bigotry. Prejudice. We've had our share of name-calling." One such incident was a cross-burning not long after Chompie's moved into its 32nd Street and Greenway Road location.
Tucker says it was hard "being a pioneer and a Jewish family coming from New York, and not having a lot of Jewish people around. Getting the right people to help us fix things in this town was not easy - we had to fly people in sometimes."
One of the difficulties stemmed from the Arizona Department of Health being unfamiliar with the New York method of baking bagels.
"The health department did not know anything about it. They didn't understand and they didn't want to understand, because they didn't care," Borenstein says. To make authentic New York-style bagels the way the Borensteins did in Chompie's early years, "You have to put them on wood boards covered in burlap, and then you nail down the burlap to the wood board with galvanized nails. The health department didn't like the boards, they didn't like the burlap, they didn't like the nails. We convinced them, but until they understood, we had our hands full."
Two new elements of the Chompie's business are its new low-carbohydrate bagels and breads, and its wholesale bakery located in Central Phoenix.
In response to high demand for Chompie's specialties that didn't conflict with the numerous low-carb diets on the market, the company began producing low-carb items about nine months ago. Cinnamon raisin, plain, sesame and "everything" low-carb bagels are available, as well as several types of breads. In addition to being available at Chompie's locations, the products are also being sold at local supermarkets such as A.J.'s Fine Foods, Bashas', Hi-Health and Sprout's Markets.
Wholesale baking is done at the new bakery location in downtown Phoenix. Although all baking for the restaurants is done at the individual locations, the new bakery handles corporate accounts for hotels, coffee shops and delis around the Valley, as well as the products that are sold in grocery stores and large jobs for catering or charity. For example, Chompie's recently produced and donated more than 15,000 bagels to nourish tired runners during the Rock 'n' Roll Marathon on Jan. 11, an event that raised funds for cancer research. Chompie's has also been involved with MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger as well as events benefiting cancer, leukemia and cystic fibrosis charities.
After 25 years of serving New York Jewish food to the Valley, Borenstein and Tucker credit hard work on the part of everyone in the family as the key to the business' success.
"It was day in and day out, seven days a week, and everyone was on call morning, noon and night," says Borenstein.
Tucker states, "Every penny we earned was because we worked very hard. My family worked very hard to make it a success."
Contact the writer at jennifer_goldberg@jewishaz.com.
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