The restaurant, which has been open for the reason that Seventies, will closet his weekend.
Photograph: Courtesy Elephant & Fortress
The howls of despair and rending of clothes started final week. Amongst a sure sort of tenured New Yorker — downtown in have an effect on if not all the time in residence, artistically or bohemianly inclined, of a sure age, by no means leaving — the information unfold shortly, as information of sickness typically does. Elephant & Fortress (all the time with an ampersand, by no means an “and”), the beloved West Village restaurant, was near the tip. After 50 years on Greenwich Avenue, its last day might be this coming Sunday.
On a current afternoon, as I sat over a Gold’n Inexperienced omelet (spinach and cheddar, in an admiral French-style roll), I watched Susan Kramer, a 60-something common, learn the closure discover exterior, stroll in, sit down, and burst into tears. “We’ve been coming right here perpetually, for many years,” Kramer, who moved to New York from Miami Seashore in 1976 to attend Parsons, instructed me. “It’s nearly like a cocoon in right here! Is it not cool sufficient? I’m sorry, this place may be very cool. This place was cool earlier than folks knew what cool was.”
Elephant & Fortress opened in 1974, the primary restaurant in what can be a string of side-hustle eating places owned by George Schwarz, who had fled Nazi Germany as a toddler and ended up a radiation oncologist at close by St. Vincent’s. Schwarz bemoaned the shortage of respectable, reasonably priced meals within the neighborhood, and within the grand custom of hobbyist restaurateurs — the New York equal of the gentleman farmer — he purchased the café when it got here up on the market. “I feel at first he wished a spot to get some good meals,” his son, Mono Schwarz-Kogelnik, instructed me. “He was pissed off with what the hospital cafeteria needed to supply.”
Elephant & Fortress, named in homage to the London pub that gave its title to the London neighborhood, was much less of a pub than a café and restaurant. It by no means had a bar, and this journal as soon as known as it (oddly) a “excellent place to take a clergyperson.” It shortly grew to become a low-key vacation spot for ’70s-style New American delicacies. (Its thrives of Merlot-ginger sauce, which endure to today, are the type that I additionally affiliate with the Silver Palate, the legendary connoisseur takeaway store of the identical period uptown.) It was open all day — it served brunch when the phrase “brunch” nonetheless needed to be defined to New York Occasions readers — and might be both a price or a deal with, relying on the way you performed it. That early Occasions piece known as out 21 completely different omelets on the menu together with the Poor Girl’s with garlic croutons for $1.95. The late Mimi Sheraton as soon as known as theirs “one of the best cup of American espresso within the metropolis.”
Ceramic elephants nonetheless dot the darkish wood-paneled partitions of the Fortress, and the menu hasn’t modified all that a lot. You may nonetheless get lots of the home classics (pasta with goat cheese and arugula, Caesar salad), burgers, and plenty of omelets, although not the Poor Girl’s. The servers’ T-shirts learn “J’adore Les Omelettes.” Isaac Mizrahi, one in all Elephant & Fortress’s most devoted regulars, instructed me he typically says that from the stage at his cabaret exhibits.
“It feels just like the final actually civilized place to eat within the metropolis,” Mizrahi instructed me. (He particularly appreciates that the music — Dave Brubeck on the afternoon I used to be there — is saved soothingly low.) Mizrahi is the type of well-known New Yorker who beloved the place. CBS Sunday Morning’s Mo Rocca was a daily. Richard Howard, the late poet and translator, was dedicated to it. Tales have been circulating about Victor Garber’s common visits, or working into Wallace Shawn there. The filmmaker Bart Freundlich used to host breakfast conferences, mentioned the chef Gary Kuschnereit. Typically his spouse, Julianne Moore, got here too. They sat among the many regulars and native eccentric — just like the apartment-building doorman who would come for lunch and organize his desk with photographs of Hollywood starlets of the ’40s. (The restaurant nonetheless serves a dessert known as Scarlett O’Hara’s Espresso Cantata, with espresso ice cream, raspberries, scorching fudge, and whipped cream, and no matter Dick the Doorman’s leanings could have been, this sort of camp backbeat endeared it to the native homosexual group, which made up a good portion of its fan base.)
Schwarz ultimately opened plenty of eating places, amongst them One Fifth, the place a younger Keith McNally obtained his begin (McNally recalled Schwarz as a passionate gourmand who would take staffers to three-star meals and evaluation each specific but additionally as the person who took a swing at him on the Odeon, the restaurant he left One Fifth to discovered). Afterward, there was the equally beloved Noho Star, and later nonetheless, Schwarz purchased Keens, the 140-year-old steakhouse on thirty sixth Avenue, with its well-known pipe-dangling ceiling. “I lived above Keens for years,” Schwarz-Kogelnik instructed me. “I really went by the closed restaurant to get to my condominium, which isn’t one thing I would need on most individuals.”
Schwarz died in 2016, and after the sale of Keens final 12 months, Elephant & Fortress is the final of his eating places nonetheless owned by his property. (There have been, through the years, two different Elephant & Castles, on Prince Avenue and on Bond Avenue, in addition to one in Dublin, however they’ve all closed or been offered.) It’s also the final stronghold of people that labored for and knew Schwarz. Employees got here and would typically keep for years, and the property’s executors are two former staff, who needed to make the choice to shut.
“It’s heartbreaking,” one in all them, Bonnie Jenkins, instructed me. The restaurant had been shedding cash for years, even earlier than the pandemic, a diminution that started when St. Vincent’s closed in 2010. Its hours are a lot shorter than they as soon as had been. The property owns the 1910 constructing, however even with out the stress of a landlord, rising prices and fewer patrons ultimately took their toll. The property has not but been offered, Jenkins says, nor has the enterprise and the title; probably the most devoted of the regulars have been working the telephones, desperately looking for a white knight to save lots of the place. (McNally was approached; Danny Meyer sympathetically however politely declined.) They surprise a couple of GoFundMe, or another crowd-sourced earnings. However the prevailing feeling among the many workers is that the writing has been on the wall for a while, and the information has been obtained with unhappiness however not shock.
“In the long run, it was only a matter of duty,” Jenkins mentioned. “We simply couldn’t hold going and going and shedding and shedding and shedding. It’s a really small restaurant, and George by no means believed in ever compromising something. It was one of the best of all the pieces, as a result of he wished that for himself and the visitor.” Kuschnereit, who first joined in 1988 and regardless of occasional sabbaticals through the years and might be within the kitchen until the final day, instructed me he’s by no means labored in a restaurant the place the proprietor insisted on taste-testing each ingredient, worth be damned. It’s all the time been Stilton within the fried-chicken salad, as a result of no different blue cheese would do.
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