PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... above all else, a dauntingly complete history of restaurants that served various kinds of Eastern European milchig cuisine to generations of mostly Ashkenazi Jews ... even the voluptuousness of the cuisine that Katchor celebrates so sincerely in The Dairy Restaurant — thick yogurt, fresh cream, butter by the metric ton — can look deceptively austere and plain, its dense and complex minimalism uncannily well suited to the monochromatic washes and blocky shapes that mark Katchor’s style of drawing ... If you are trying to cut down on your consumption of nostalgia, The Dairy Restaurant is not for you. Yet there will be eating of knishes in dark times too, and one could do worse than to remember just what brought figures like Mostel and Harry Belafonte together at Steinberg’s ... When Katchor is telling stories like these, there is precious little to distinguish his melancholy yiddishkeit from his historical method ... does much more than simply revisit the Jewish landscapes of New York that provided Katchor with so much of the material for his terrific early works. If the figure of Julius Knipl captures the restless urban sensibility of the classic flâneur in midcentury Jewish drag — a Borscht-Belt Baudelaire on the prowl for gefilte fish, not prostitutes — The Dairy Restaurant operates on a far vaster scale, one that evokes a different side of the work of Walter Benjamin ... there’s clearly more than one way to mourn, and Katchor has rendered his experience of loss into a monument, worthy of its sweep and scale for all its humble themes.
