Yonah Shimmel's Knish Bakery
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Yonah Schimmel's Knish Bakery is a bakery that has been selling knishes on the Lower East Side of Manhattan since 1890 from its original location on Houston Street. As the Lower East Side has changed over the decades and many of its Jewish residents have departed, Yonah Schimmel's is one of the few distinctly Jewish businesses and restaurants that remain as a fixture of this largely-departed culture and cuisine.[1][2]
As cited in The Underground Gourmet, a review of Yonah Schimmel's in a collection of restaurant reviews by Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder, "No New York politician in the last 50 years has been elected to office without having at least one photograph showing him on the Lower East Side with a knish in his face."[3]
About 1890, Yonah Schimmel used a pushcart to start his knish bakery. As business grew, a small store on Houston Street was rented by Yonah and his cousin Joseph Berger. When Yonah left the business a few years later, Berger took over the business, retaining the original name. In 1910, the Bergers moved the business to the south side of Houston Street, at its current location.
It is as much a landmark as an eatery and has frequently been an artist's subject and a portrait of the Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery by Hedy Pagremanski (b. 1929) is in the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
The restaurant offers a number of varieties of knishes in addition to other kinds of Eastern European food such as borscht, and runs a brisk takeout business.
[edit] References
- ^ Topics ; Preservation Tales; Knisheries, Calories, The New York Times, February 5, 1985. Accessed June 21, 2007.
- ^ Berger, Joseph. " Trendiness Among the Tenements; Descendants Return to a Remade Lower East Side", The New York Times, September 2, 2004. Accessed June 21, 2007. "H. Eckstein & Sons was not quite as much a fixture of the Lower East Side as Guss's Pickles or Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery."
- ^ Asimov, Eric. "$25 and Under", The New York Times, December 27, 1996. Accessed June 21, 2007.
