Barney Greengrass started selling a limited-edition Knicks tee earlier this year. Photo: Mark Zhelezoglo
In 2014, the Gray’s Papaya on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village closed for good, and I was inconsolable. Five years later, when City Bakery’s time came to an end, I was in even worse shape. I know the drill. If you’ve lived in New York long enough — for me, that’s my whole life — you’re forced to accept that the wrecking ball eventually comes for our local heirlooms. But lately I’ve wondered if there is a fate worse than closure: watching an establishment pander itself to the nostalgia-loving influencer crowd in the hope of going viral. Are these the only options available to our legacy institutions? To go out like Japonica, Donohue’s, or Angelica Kitchen, softly and sadly, or to go the way of Katz’s and JG Melon, as overrun as Nantucket with swarms of content-crazed tourists whose willingness to stand in hours-long lines is not shared by most longtime regulars?
The threat of those lines is why I felt a clench of mild panic when I noticed that some landmarks from my own childhood had, in recent months, become more active on social media and in press outreach. When the limited-edition Barney Greengrass dad caps dropped, I knew there was no going back. But I still wanted to know why — why risk ruining a good thing with ideas that, at first, seem to fly in the face of these businesses’ hard-worn timelessness?
One place where the winds of change are whistling at the door is at the 50-plus-year-old Upper East Side café and prepared foods shop, E.A.T. After a renovation and launching an Instagram account, founder and paterfamilias Eli Zabar was suddenly everywhere: chatting with Flynn McGarry in Interview, getting featured in the Times’ “Style” section while hosting a party for Substack’s most prominent writers, hitting the How Long Gone podcast, and opining on bread and butter for Blackbird.
When I ask Eli if he thinks any of these initiatives have made a difference in business, he responds flatly with a “no.” But he says he’s happy to take part, often at the behest of his twin sons, Oliver and Sasha. “We’ve seen some viral food trends recently that I look at, and I think, you know, We could do those, but it’s just not us,” says Oliver, who tends to the day-to-day operations of his father’s namesake company, which also comprises a collection of gourmet markets throughout Manhattan. But, says Sasha — who was previously on the payroll and currently manages his Gen-Z-approved dessert shop, Glace — the family hasn’t done “a good enough job” of recruiting new customers or creating a sense of nostalgia around the market: “There’s no sentimentality at E.A.T.” But the twins do see an untapped audience and are trying to appeal directly to them: The adult offspring of their longtime customers who have chosen to stay in New York.
“The people who come to E.A.T. for nostalgia come back because they came with their parents, and now they’re back with their kids and their strollers. They live uptown. They’ve basically turned into their parents,” Oliver says. He gets a lot of feedback from those customers about items they remember eating as children and have returned for—things like the plain sugar doughnut, a ham-and-cheese sandwich on ficelle, or the “tower of bagel” with smoked salmon and cream cheese.
Spreading the gospel of Eli is the job of a restaurant publicist the Zabars recently hired, but talking directly to those potential customers is the charge of Lulu Graham, the 26-year-old who oversees social media and marketing for the family. She says the primary question she asks herself is, “How do we remind the people that went there when they were 2 with their grandparents that they can still go and that it’s exactly the same?”
A similar generational turnover is playing out on the west side of the park at Barney Greengrass. “We have a lot of tourists, but we are not a tourist trap,” says Gary Greengrass, the third-generation owner of the place Anthony Bourdain once said had “the best breakfast in the universe” and remains on most lists of the city’s most important restaurants. Gary hopes to keep it that way; he’s all for having a line out the door, just not one that snakes down the street and leaves anyone waiting outside for more than 30 minutes. Still, changes are afoot within the Sturgeon King’s fiefdom: After a 2019 Instagram announcement that the restaurant had “joined the digital age,” the restaurant barely posted until earlier this year. Just like that, Gary was all over the feed, standing in the store his grandfather opened in 1908, grinning beside Arnold Schwarzenegger or Martha Stewart, or posing with Andy Cohen after a stint as his show’s guest bartender. In the spring, as the Knicks were starting their playoff run to the NBA Finals, Barney Greengrass released a limited-edition tee to mark the occasion, and fans went nuts: Adam Sandler was filmed wearing his; David Remnick wrote an ode to the hallowed hall of smoked fish.
Barney Greengrass merch. Barney Greengrass.
The Knicks shirts, along with two-toned dad caps and some limited-edition World Cup–themed jerseys, are the work of Gary’s 19-year-old son, Moe, an NYU student who sees an opportunity to build further brand recognition and “bring in a whole other clientele” that otherwise wouldn’t make a special trip to that residential block on the Upper West Side. This is the demographic he believes would be primed to visit an outpost of Barney Greengrass in Miami, Vegas, Dallas — or lower Manhattan, where wants to open branches of his great-grandfather’s flagship … provided his dad lets him.
“I want to be the Nobu of breakfast,” Moe says before mentioning hotels, a night club, and Sushi Club, the streetwear brand started by Nobu Matsuhisa and designer Chris Stamp that hosts pop-ups and collaborates on limited-edition products with companies including Nike and the Gap. Gary is supportive of the clothes, sold under the 1908 label, but less sure about Moe’s suggestion to integrate AI into all back-end operations (Gary remains adamant about sending handwritten notes to his customers reminding them to place their orders for the Jewish high holidays).
Sarah Raffetto encountered similar pushback at the 120-year-old pasta emporium her great-grandfather founded. She now runs it with her father, uncle, and two cousins, and decisions that might be routine at other shops — whether to update the website, or add high-protein pastas to the product roster — are made in the context of how they’ll affect the store’s legacy and its carefully calibrated chemistry. Sarah was able to convince everyone to let her introduce sandwiches and a seasonal ice-cream cart, and those have been successful enough to generate a surge in traffic during the slow months of summer and to imagine a future in which Raffetto’s opens a sandwich spinoff. But it’s the monthly supper club she’s introduced — Petite Pasta Joint, which Sarah started with the food-world personality Emily Fedner — that has brought in the most new customers: Spots, when they are announced, sell out within minutes.
In all cases, I probably needn’t worry; the new initiatives, introduced carefully and cautiously and always in the service of the larger enterprise, do little to disrupt business at the flagships. They are, in the end, marketing that’s designed to ensure these spots stay relevant and secure their future, even if, in the case of something like E.A.T., putting their octogenarian founder on a podcast doesn’t always play out in ways the new generation might expect. “He’s actually, like, really bad at it,” Sasha says of his father’s uncensored appearances, “but that’s what makes him so endearing.”