[Sca-cooks] Yonah Shimmel's

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach lilinah at earthlink.net:
>I thought this venerable institution might have been a thing of mere 
>memory. But Google turned up:
>
>Since 1910
>Yonah Shimmel's Knishery
>1-212-477-2858
>LOWER EAST SIDE
>137 E. Houston, btwn 1st & 2nd Ave
>http://knishery.com/
>
>For folks who aren't familiar with Manhattan, that street name is 
>pronounced "house-ton", not "hugh-ston" as in Texas, and not 
>"who-ston" as i've heard on the BBC.

And that's why the neighborhood immediately to the south of Houston 
Street is not known as So-Who, but Soho ;-) . Yes, Yonah Schimmel's 
is there all right. I also haven't been there in years, but I passed 
it recently and it looks more or less the same as always. And for the 
one-two punch, there's Russ & Daughters down the street (I think they 
also sell yogurt -- they do fish and dairy products).

>I'm sure it's not what it used to be, but then, when i was going 
>there in the late 1960s, it already wasn't what it had been...

Kids today, tsk tsk, doing the cha cha and not listening to their 
parents. It's da same all over, let me tell ya.

>I feel pretty confident that they no longer make yogurt every night 
>in little juice glasses lined up on a tray, then covered with a 
>clean white linen towel: the lactobacilli were probably "in the 
>house".

You may be right, and it probably has to do with silly things like 
insurance and gummint regulation. I have a friend who's been there 
pretty recently. I'll ask her for her impressions on all that.

>It was pretty funky back then. The floor sure had the wear of the 
>years on it. Now you can order your knishes on-line

My suspicion is that, given the nature of the business, dealing in an 
assortment of essentially fermented items (Heaven only knows how they 
deal with Passover, unless it's to shut the place down and clean like 
maniacs), the floor is not only worn by the passage of feet and 
years, but it may also be cleaned with various abrasives, like a 
butcher's block.

>
>Anahita
>not planning on ordering Yonah Shimmel's knishes on-line

It looks like YS may have simply licensed the name, and maybe the 
recipes, which can be adapted to some extent for mass production. And 
that's fine for people who don't have other options, but this may not 
mean that the knishes at Schimmel's have changed much.

Adamantius, with a hankering for Sammy's Romanian Steak House...
-- 






"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If they have no bread, you have to say, let them eat 
brioche."
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", pub 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04