Featured Restaurant: Cafe Edison

GutterGourmet — December 03, 2009

Chopped Liver Sandwich at the Polish Tea Room. Left, 47th Street entrance. Right, lobby entrance.

So I’m schlepping around the Schmatte District looking for a bowl of matzoh ball soup and a nosh when I realize I’m all the way up on 46th street outside of The Hotel Edison (site). I walk through the hotel lobby all the way in the back through a nondescript door leading into a little coffee shop. Cafe Edison (view) aka the “Polish Tea Room” is not at all fancy-pants like the Russian Tea Room. In fact, it’s a bit schmutzy but haymish.

I get a booth and order the soup. The kneidlach are to die for. Better than the 2nd Avenue Deli’s if that’s possible. It was a shonda that this was not included in AlwaysHungryNY.com’s Top Five Matzoh Ball Soups! Then I order a bissel of the Kasha Varnishkes on the side, the Chopped Liver and the Hot Roumanian Pastrami on Rye. The bowtie pasta, buckwheat and onions are superb, the chopped liver with hard-boiled eggs needed a touch of salt, but the pastrami, though not up to Katz’s or the 2nd Avenue Deli’s standards, is just fine.

I am a maven when it comes to Chocolate Egg Creams and this one is poifect. Being a fresser, I cannot leave without ordering the blintzes, all three of them (the waiter already thinks I’m meshuga). The cheese, cherry and blueberry fried crepes make me think of my old bubby who was a waitress at Ratner’s when she was a girl. I ate so much I could plotz.

Café Edison is truly a time machine if you want to go kibitz or kvetch for an hour. I must return to try the Latkes, the Matzo Brei and the Gefilte Fish.

Click Here for Beautiful Pictures of Food at the Polish Tea Room >>

AHNY: Top 5 Matzoh Balls? Nope, Just Three

Jeff Zalaznick & Arthur Bovino — April 07, 2009

In honor of Passover, AlwaysHungry set out to find New York’s top five matzoh balls. What we discovered surprised us: there is no Top 5. New York City, despite having the world’s second largest Jewish population outside Tel Aviv, has only three knaidlech contenders. Sure, it was close between the top two but for the most part, outside these top three contenders, everything else was for the birds.

Noodles and dill, carrots and celery—we decided not to consider these varying soup ingredients as determining factors. This is about matzoh balls. After all, competing philosophies on how best to construct them are distracting enough (seltzer or water? oil or schmaltz? how long should the eggs be beaten? seasoned inside or out? boiled in salt water or chicken broth?). For Top 5 purposes, we judged based on three criteria: texture, flavor and appearance.

Continue Reading About Matzoh Ball Mania… >>