Tostada With That Lox?

Before Rosh Hashana begins at sunset Sept. 10, Katella Deli will set out all the traditional foods of the season: twisted turban bread, macaroon tortes, rounded dough balls and light, spongy cakes.

But the well-known delicatessen doesn’t limit its fare to kosher-style foods for Jewish holidays. It also offers tostada specials on Cinco de Mayo, corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day and, at Christmas, candy canes, gingerbread men and cookies featuring Yule greetings in Spanish.

“Christmas is a big season for us,” said Larry Ratman, one of the founder’s sons. “We cater to whoever is celebrating the season, and Christmas is bigger than Hanukkah.”

To keep pace with Orange County’s rapidly diversifying population, ethnic eateries along Katella Avenue and elsewhere are adapting. Most of the residents in Los Alamitos, where Katella Deli has operated for more than three decades, have always been non-Jewish. But growing competition and an increasingly cosmopolitan clientele in recent years have posed new challenges to establishments--like Katella Deli--that historically served specific ethnic communities.

“We cater to everybody now,” said Ratman, 51, “where at one time we catered mainly to Jews.”

That time wasn’t so long ago. In the mid-1950s, when Larry Ratman’s father, Sam, opened his first Jewish bakery in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, the main fare was bagels, and virtually every customer was Jewish.

The Polish baker and his wife, Shirley--both Holocaust survivors who came to the United States by way of Ellis Island--relocated to Katella Avenue in 1965 and quickly established themselves as proprietors of the best-known Jewish deli in greater Long Beach and north Orange County.

“My dad always thought he could succeed wherever he went,” Larry Ratman recalled. “He had the Midas touch.”

The deli’s customers changed little during the later years of Sam Ratman, who died in 1984. The shift began shortly afterward. Whereas more than 75% of the deli’s customers were Jewish in those days, Larry Ratman said, only about half are today.

As a result, though the menu still features such traditional Jewish fare as gefilte fish, matzo ball soup and hand-sliced lox, new items like Mexican-style potato skins, chicken tostadas and Oriental salads have been added.

“We’ve gotten into diversifying,” Ratman said. “When you’re in an area with lots of groups, you’ve got to cater to everyone.”

The change is particularly evident behind the counter, where only one of the five workers who cut the kosher-style meats is Jewish. Most of the others are Latino.

Despite the long tradition of the Jewish deli man, Ratman said: “Jews just don’t want to get into this anymore. Mexican Americans, on the other hand, tend to want to do it, and they do it well.”

The multiethnic dining motif is apparent for most of the length of Katella, where Chinese restaurants and Mexican markets stand near an Arabic coffeehouse and an Armenian eatery.

Aravat Family Restaurant, which recently hosted an Armenian memorial service for 75 people, operated in Anaheim for years next door to a Mexican bar, owner Marguerite Karamanlian said.

“Katella has something for everybody,” said Karamanlian, whose restaurant offers lamb kebabs, stuffed grape leaves and falafel.

At some ethnic restaurants, longtime customers don’t always consider all the change to be good. James Minsky, for one, who for 10 years has traveled from his home in Montebello to patronize Katella Deli, said the place has definitely changed.

“They used to have almost all Jewish waitresses,” said Minsky, 82. “It used to be a homey place to go and talk--now it’s more like a big business.”

Another regular, Ronnie Rubin of Cypress, said she has had to retrain herself to place orders in English rather than Yiddish or Hebrew. “I’ve gotten used to saying ‘egg bread’ instead of ‘challah,’ ” Rubin said, when she orders the traditional Jewish bread.

She is philosophic about the change, however.

“I don’t blame them,” she said of the deli’s proprietors. “You can’t survive today by catering to a small ethnic group.”