We all have those restaurants—those venues that, just thought of them, brings us back to a certain place and time in our lives. Maybe they are from childhood, possibly young adulthood; maybe they are still going, possibly long closed. Where you can be walking down a street half the world away and the sight of a chair through a café window can trigger a recollection so intense that you are transported thousands of miles and tens of years away. Sometimes it’s a scent, the name of a dish, a song, or an unconnected story that sets you off on a wave of nostalgia—for me, this past week it was a photo on Instagram of the Maida Vale tube station that brought me back to a favourite take-out place next door, closed for likely over fifteen years, where my family would pick up Singapore noodles for dinner after renting some VHS’s around the corner.
Though I’ve long considered deleting it, I maintain a Facebook account to belong to a variety of groups centred on specific history-related interests, particularly local history ones. I’m part of local history groups from all over the country, all over the world—places I’ve never visited, some I’ve simply passed through, and those I know intimately. Members post old photos of long-forgotten venues and stores (perfect for a retail history obsessive like me), ask for clarification or corroboration of half-remembered memories, and share reminiscences. Food and restaurants come up often.
There is much academic and anecdotal writing on culinary nostalgia, food and memory—from the Proustian to the anthropological, all seeking to explain why food plays such a part in our memories and, therefore, in our cultural identity. As scholar Patrizia La Trecchia writes, “Early food memories remain etched in our minds to remind us how subtly and substantially food, which is so central to the sustenance of our lives and the most natural manifestation of our humanness, affirms our cultural identity and our ethnicity and is associated with our significant social relationships.” She continues: “When consuming a particular food, not only do we ingest a meal, we incorporate emotions and create memories. A meal has the power to evoke visual and sensory landscapes by mapping the sites where we have eaten, the faces of the people with whom we have shared a meal, the kitchens where we have prepared a meal or observed other people preparing a meal, and all the places where we have shopped for food (the deli store, the bakery, or the garden where our ancestors grew their vegetables). Eating, cooking, and food shopping are all activities that organize our lives and define our place in the world. Not only are we what we eat, we also are where we eat, and what we ate in the past.”
A few months ago, a conversation in an Upper West Side-focused Facebook group (the neighbourhood where I spent the first few years of my life) on long-lost restaurants had me sifting through my hundreds of vintage cookbooks, a vague memory of a restaurant inclusion spurring me on. The cookbook in question is The Underground Gourmet Cookbook, published in 1975, and written by graphic designers Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder. From the introduction:
“Just about ten years ago, an innocent conversation without any apparent portent took place on the corner of 31st Street and Lexington Avenue… The subject of the discussion was restaurants—good, cheap and generally unrecognized. We were trying to outdo each other with our personal knowledge of where these finds were tucked away in the city, and as we continued to match our special discoveries—restaurant for restaurant, eating place for eating place--we realized that information of this sort had never been gathered into any formal collection or book. Restaurant reviews at that time were directed virtually without exception toward those establishments grouped in the moderately priced to expensive range. The plain-to-see yet ignored fact was that the greater-numbered followers of good food were more interested in eating well yet inexpensively, getting their money's worth and perhaps adding a certain measure of adventure to their gastronomic pursuit. Thus, the idea of some sort of compendium filling that badly overlooked need was born there on the sidewalks of New York... The unparalleled ethnic diversity of New York offered us a seeming abundance of good, cheap interesting eating places. We began by pooling our knowledge and walking the streets in search of the city's yet undiscovered cornucopia. The ultimate aim was to put our findings into a guide—one that eventually became The Underground Gourmet or, as the first edition's subtitle read, "How to Eat Well in New York for Under $2.00 and As Low As 50 Cents."
Over those ten years, “Underground Gourmet” became a regular column in New York magazine and launched a series of associated books for other cities in America. The cookbook evolved out of a desire to share recipes from these restaurants with home cooks—a somewhat difficult endeavour as many of the chefs spoke little English and cooked intuitively, without measuring or written recipes. The Underground Gourmet Cookbook features over 250 recipes from 72 New York City establishments.
As they continue in the introduction, “Many of the restaurants in which they ply their profession are landmarks; others, more ephemeral, come and go for a variety of reasons. Even some mentioned in this book will have vanished during the time between research and publication.” I painstakingly went through the list of restaurants (launching many more than 72 rabbit holes), and only three still exist in some form. I understand that it is 49 years since the publication of this volume, but still a sad situation, especially considering that many on the list were old-school institutions that had already survived forty or more years. Looking through the list we can see a city’s food culture in transition. There are cafeterias and luncheonettes, Jewish dairy restaurants, and a preponderance of German, Austrian, and Hungarian restaurants—all standing for the old guard of ethnic cheaps eats in NYC—alongside new-fangled ideas like macrobiotics (two restaurants) and newer immigrant cuisines.1 Of the four kosher dairy restaurants included, all are closed—and as far as I know, there is only one surviving dairy restaurant in the city, B & H Dairy (still my favourite lunch counter for a bowl of borscht), which has been open since 1938.
Great care is taken in explaining what dishes like falafel are, foods that now seem so commonplace that it is hard to imagine a cosmopolitan food culture without them. Each restaurant’s recipes are preceded by a short bio of the establishment and the people behind it; what connects all these diverse cuisines is the passion of the owners/chefs, the homey quality of the food and interior, the sense that these restaurants existed for the love of sharing food and not for profit (likely contributing to their often-short lives). These are the kinds of restaurants people still remember fifty years later, writing up long recollections about their first time trying bratwurst or dim sum, sharing memories on Facebook, blogs, and other forums.
I hope you have some dearly remembered cafes and restaurants that you visit in your memories—possibly trying to recreate dishes from dim recollections—and places you dine at now that will become the fodder of future nostalgia.
Below is the full list of restaurants included in the book, with images, menus, and links where I could find them—many left no traces beyond these recipes. More this weekend on the restaurant featured in The Underground Gourmet Cookbook (and that Facebook post) that started this whole reminiscence.
Restaurants featured in The Underground Gourmet Cookbook
1. Akasaka
2. Aki Dining Room
3. Alanbess Luncheonette
4. Angelo of Mulberry Street: Open under new management
5. Asia de Cuba
6. Atlantic House
7. Atran Cultural Center Restaurant
8. Bayanihan
9. Belcrep
10. The Belmore Cafeteria (as seen in Taxi Driver)
11. The Brazilian Coffee Restaurant
12. Brazilian Pavilion
13. Cabana Carioca
14. Café Manila
15. Caffe de Alfredo
17. Chez Brigitte
18. The Damascus Bakery: Still baking, now all wholesale
19. East-West Cookery
20. Epicure’s Kitchen Cuisine
21. Fairmont Viennese Restaurant
22. Foo Joy
23. Food
24. The Front Porch
25. Gefen’s Dairy Restaurant
26. Gourmet on the Run
27. The Grand Dairy Restaurant
28. Green Tree
30. Hee Seung Fung Teahouse-Restaurant
31. Hellenic Palace
32. Hershey’s Dairy Restaurant
33. Hong Ying Rice Shop
34. Ideal Lunch and Bar
35. Ideal Restaurant
36. Idra
37. Jack’s Nest
38. Jamuna
39. Jerome Cafeteria
40. Leshko’s
41. Meson Flamenco
42. Mexifrost Specialities Co., Inc.
43. Mi Tierra
44. Molfetas
45. Monya’s
46. Near East
47. The New Korea
48. Ole
50. The Paradox
52. Pierre au Tunnel
53. Pierre’s Falafel
54. Ponce de Leon
55. Pot au Feu
56. La Potagerie
57. The Puglia Restaurant: Still open at 105 years old
58. Ralph’s
59. El Rancho Argentino
60. Red Tulip Hungarian Restaurant
61. Sakura Chaya
62. Schaefer’s
63. Shalimar
64. Shanti
65. Szechuan Royal
66. Szechuan Taste
67. Tai Fung Lau
68. La Taza de Oro
69. Texas Taco
70. Tip Top
71. Victoria China
72. Vincent Petrosino’s Seafood Restaurant and Fish Market
Food studies professor Krishnendu Ray writes, “In New York City in 1850, for instance, 70 percent of hotel and restaurant employees and 70 percent of hotelkeepers were foreign-born, mostly of Irish and German heritage. Fifty years later, according to the 1900 census, 63 percent of hotel and restaurant employees were foreign-born (Irish and German predominate) and 65 percent of hotelkeepers were foreign-born (mostly German). Restaurant-keepers, a newly significant occupation by 1900, were 67 percent foreign-born at a time when the foreign-born comprised about 50 percent of the population. Even by the 1950 census, after immigration had subsided, 64 percent of restaurant cooks were foreign-born (Italians now at the top, followed by Greeks, Chinese, and Germans). According to the 2000 census, that trend continued, with 75 percent of restaurant cooks (and 64 percent of restaurant workers) in New York City foreign-born, but the dominant countries and regions of origin were now Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean Basin, South America, China, and the former Soviet Union (Ruggles et al. 2004).”
Wow thank you for taking the time to type all this up and research these places.
I know nothing lasts forever and New York is always changing but it’s still a bummer so many of these places are gone. I’ve tried to find that German spot “Ideal” before (my husband is from Germany), prob saw the sign in a movie. A few weeks ago I was looking for “Steak n’ Eggs” from Panic in Needle Park. But nothing.
For years I’ve was trying to find the NYC restaurant where as a kid we ate in the kitchen, and they served us curry french fries (the curry powder was in the oil), thanks to one of these menu archives online, I finally found it recently. Was that a satisfying feeling, haha !!! David Burke’s Park Avenue Cafe.
Sorry one more thing. The writer Nick Tosches was a good friend of mine. And a big lover of food. He’d always wax poetic about the places and meals that were gone. He would have loved this post.