I liked Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop on 5th Ave. in NYC, across from the Flatiron Building. It was an old school luncheonette, unpretentious, economical and more popular than it's good but not great food would lead one to expect.
It was March 2021 and Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop, a Madison Square mainstay since 1929 shut down. The luncheonette was bought by its fifth owner, Warren Chiu in 2018. He promised “to keep Eisenberg’s the way it has been,” but could not. Revenues were down and the pandemic was slaughtering businesses in NYC. The restaurant that had been "raising New York City's cholesterol since 1929" was gone. It was a sad day for people such as myself who regularly enjoyed meeting friends for lunch or an early supper at Eisenberg's. It wasn't the best sandwich in NYC but it was reliably good and the atmosphere, harkening back to a day when lunch counters were common and people ate shoulder to shoulder was worthwhile and worthy of preservation.
A year later, the proprietors of Brooklyn's Court Street Grocer's took over the location, cleaned it up, restoring it to its former glory and reopened as S&P Café, a clone of Eisenberg's with a name snatched from the past. Warren Chiu seems to own the rights to the name Eisenberg's and rather than yield it to a worthy successor, unapologetically kept the website, with "nyc.com" as part of its address and has opened a pop-up in San Francisco. Since they couldn't call it Eisenberg's they took the name of the eatery that was in the same location before the Eisenberger brothers opened their place. Yet outside, above the plate glass windows the old Eisenberg's sign remains.
The popularity of the new place is reassuring. The menu is almost the same as the old, with prices adjusted for changing times. The sandwiches seemed a bit better, the meat a little jucier, the rye bread terrific. The furniture and many of the employees are the same though the old cash register at the end of the counter's been replaced by a modern electronic tablet.
The first two photos were taken in 2018. The interior black and white shot shows the place just before closing on a weeknight, so it's no surprise it's quite.
The next three were taken as the interregnum was ending. The outside looks the same but there was a new sign being painted on the glass by the person in the next photo followed by a shot of what the interior looked like when it was being restored.
The last batch were taken during two visits. That woman sure is enjoying her potato pancake!
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