Yonah Shimmel Knish Bakery

[pras]

Yonah Shimmel Knish Bakery located on Houston Street has been in the same location since 1910.  While not fancy by any means, it is a step back in time.  The small cramped location does a huge carryout business but also has tables in the back with "sit down service".  Everything is made in house in a subterranean kitchen with  a dumbwaiter lifting trays of knishes to street level.  The menu veers to traditional with some modern touches (my grandma wouldn't really appreciate jalapenos in her knish).  You can also order other traditional Eastern European Jewish staples such as kasha and varnishkas.  The potato knish served warm is very good and even better with a bit of the spicy brown mustard served from a squeeze jar on the table.  The walls are covered with pictures of famous visitors.  Woody Allen filmed a scene here with Larry David.  There are very few vestiges of authentic Jewish LES history left.  This is certainly one of them.

[DaveO]

Ooooh.  I like that.  I'm going up to NYC a couple of times this Winter.  I'll note this to stop by. 

[Steve R.]

I've been around too long.  When food boards started (about 20 years ago now?) Yonah Shimmel was already off everyone's list.  They had opened (& closed) ill advised branches around the city and the product was less than acceptable to those of us who a)considered ourselves experts on artisanal &/or ethnic food & b)grew up & still lived with knishes everywhere.  So, having read your (pras) posting here, I started figuring out what to say in response, how to let you down easily, how to.... well, you know.  Then, a bolt of light inside my head (someone tripped on the dimmer switch I guess) and it occurred to me that I couldn't recommend a better knish place in NYC.  Not in Brooklyn, where I was raised (in a Jewish neighborhood), and not in any other part of the city.  Yes, there are glatt kosher neighborhood places that I know of (& tried), but YS is probably not worse.   It is one of the last remaining vestiges of something we all took for granted.  I'll have to go back.  You did good.

[DaveO]

38 minutes ago, Steve R. said:

I've been around too long.  When food boards started (about 20 years ago now?) Yonah Shimmel was already off everyone's list.  They had opened (& closed) ill advised branches around the city and the product was less than acceptable to those of us who a)considered ourselves experts on artisanal &/or ethnic food & b)grew up & still lived with knishes everywhere.  So, having read your (pras) posting here, I started figuring out what to say in response, how to let you down easily, how to.... well, you know.  Then, a bolt of light inside my head (someone tripped on the dimmer switch I guess) and it occurred to me that I couldn't recommend a better knish place in NYC.  Not in Brooklyn, where I was raised (in a Jewish neighborhood), and not in any other part of the city.  Yes, there are glatt kosher neighborhood places that I know of (& tried), but YS is probably not worse.   It is one of the last remaining vestiges of something we all took for granted.  I'll have to go back.  You did good.

The above reads like a wise post.  I "overlap" with Steve R a bit;  about the same age.  But I grew up in Joisy, not NYC.  I visited some of those neighborhoods when I was a kid and teenager visiting relatives in NYC.  I heard about some great restaurants, and great ethnic fooderies but I was a poor kid and definitely not a foodie.  Then from my teenage years into my mid 20's I spent a fair amount of time on the Lower East Side (what is this LES crap), sometimes working at a family business that must have started in the (I'm guessing) 1920's.  It was on Grand Street, about 5 long city blocks South of Houston and about 3 blocks from Orchard Street, the busiest most crowded commercial street in the Lower East Side.  This was the mid 1960's to latter 1970's.  It was still a busy time for that area but it was probably already changing from its heydays in earlier decades.  Clearly over that period I noticed the ever increasing expansion ) of influences from ChinaTown.   

Back to reference those "5 long blocks", I mention that because good ethnic food was part of the experience and there were dozens of great places infinitely closer and possibly better if not as well known or famous.  Easily one to three dozen all far closer than 5 long city blocks and when you are working one doesn't have time to meander around. 

All of which to say that I knew nothing of Yonah Shimmel, but like Steve I knew of many fine places to get knishes back in the day (In NY and Joisy).  But it seems to be a lost art, (with quite a few crazy miserable alternatives).   Now one of my closest pair of friends relocated to NYC.  An ever diminishing number of friends live in the area.  Some are getting ill.  I'll be up there to visit a number of times.  Yonah Shimmel will be on my list of places to visit.  There are very few places that stick to old recipes and dishes.

[Mark Slater]

One of my very first restaurant jobs as a teenager was flipping knishes and egg-rolls at a small stand in Mid-Island Plaza in Hicksville, New York.