The Toast – and the Hosts – of Broadway

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

When the Tony Awards last month announced its annual roster of special honors for “Excellence in the Theatre,” many observers were surprised – albeit, pleasantly so – the find a trio of restaurateurs on the list: Vincent Sardi Jr., proprietor of the august Midtown restaurant that is still probably the most famous Broadway eatery, and Harry and Frances Edelstein, who own and operate the guileless diner called the Edison Cafe – aka the “Polish Tearoom.”


Mr. Sardi and the Edelsteins have never met, though their businesses are a mere three blocks apart and for decades they’ve catered to some of the same hungry show folk. When, at an October 26 awards ceremony at Tavern on the Green, Mr. Sardi finally shakes hands with his downscale competition to the north, he may want to brace himself: Mr. Edelstein has a few opinions about the fancier chow houses in town.


“You go in a big restaurant, a famous restaurant, you take one drink, two drinks, everything is tasting good! Here, without whiskey, it still tastes good,” he crowed in a thick Polish accent. “You go to the big restaurants they give you one soup. Here you got six soups every day. All homemade.”


Mrs. Edelstein, a compact, dark-haired woman whose deadpan, unblinking expression provides a comic juxtaposition to her husband’s wide, jovial grin, supervises the soups. The most famous of them is the matzoh ball, which has been spooned down the throats of generations of struggling actors, as well as the well-tailored esophagi of such better-known regulars as playwrights Neil Simon and August Wilson, producer Emanuel Azenberg, Shubert Organization chairman Gerald Schoenfeld, comic Jackie Mason, and director Jerry Zaks. Three of these devotees – Messrs. Simon, Zaks, and Azenberg – felt such affection for the coffee shop that in 2001 they immortalized it in the play”45 Seconds from Broadway.” (The title, a play on the famous George M. Cohan song “45 Minutes from Broadway,” aptly described the Edison’s perch on West 47th Street.)


The honor was short-lived; the play lasted barely three months on Broadway. But in the Edison, it endures. Posters advertising the attraction make for recurrent wallpaper, as do adoring newspaper articles occasioned by the production. In between these hangings are frequently found the latest culinary accolades bestowed on the diner. Mr. Edelstein knows them by heart. “Best Potato Pancakes – Daily News.” “Best Blintzes – New York magazine.”


Mr. Edelstein, 80, and Mrs. Edelstein, 78 – both natives of the same small town in Poland who married in Warsaw – know their way around a kitchen. They’ve been in the borscht business for half of their lives, first in outer-borough neighborhoods like Carnasie and Ocean Park, then at the old Hotel Piccadilly, which once sat on West 45th Street, convenient to the offices of the Shubert Organization, whose executives regularly convened there. When the owners sold the hotel and began offering hospitality at the Edison Hotel instead, they invited the Edelsteins to tag along. The present space was unveiled in 1980. However, a stranger stepping through the door and quickly canvassing the joint – the brisk, no-nonsense service; the specials advertised on white paper taped to the wall; the incongruous scroll work on the vaulted ceiling; the bottomless-cup-of-coffee-pay-at-the-front-desk atmosphere – might set its birth at around 1932.


When the Edelsteins reopened, their bow to the producers and theater owners who put them on the map was to create a VIP section. This sanctum santorum consists of two tables and one banquette and, in actuality, probably constitutes the worst 14 seats of the restaurant’s 160.The ceilings are low, in sad contrast to the pink-and-blue, fussily adorned canopy that shelters most of the other tables. (The space was formerly a ballroom, the abbreviated balcony of which now provides a cozy home for an air-conditioning unit.) The lighting is dim. The windows looking out onto the street are blocked by a prosaic wall of potted plants. A plastic Coca Cola clock tells the rich and famous if they’re running late. The only thing informing passersby that this is the Edison’s version of the Stork Club’s Cub Room is a single velvet cordon.


“Sometimes people come, they want to sit here,” Mr. Edelstein explained. “I say, ‘You got a show on Broadway?'” The space saved Matthew Broderick’s sense of privacy more than once. “Kids would come running for him for signing autographs. I say you come here and sit down. Nobody’s gonna bother you.” The populist August Wilson, however, will have nothing to do with it. “He don’t want it. He likes to sit right by the counter.”


Decorating the walls above the banquette are: another poster of “45 Seconds From Broadway”; a Playbill carrying the image of Bernard Jacobs, the Shubert exec who was a constant cafe patron and died in 1996; and four unsigned works of abstract art. These last were executed by the couple’s grandson, Brian, who is now a lawyer in Albany. The Edelstein’s son, too, is a lawyer, as is a second grandchild. “I told them,” complained Mr. Edlstein, “I’ve got lawyers enough.”


As for successors to this kingdom of kasha varnishkas, there is son-in-law Conrad Strohl, who manages the place. When asked, Mr. Edelstein seemed unsure as to whether his daughter’s husband would continue to provide Broadway with the best in affordable shtetl-American cuisine when the couple retires to Riverdale for good. “It’s a hard job,” he explained. When the incredulous Mr. Strohl was interrogated, however, his brusque reply was, “I’ve been here 23 years. I’m here.”


For the time being, the Edelsteins still come in six days a week. “I would have retired before. But my wife…” – Mrs. Edelstein, now coming out of the kitchen, now at the cash register – “…she likes to work. She says, ‘What do you want to go home? You stay at home, you going to cry.'”


The New York Sun

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