S&P Lunch 174 Fifth Ave.

TABLES FOR TWO

- Hannah Goldfield

“I’m looking for that old New York flavor that you don’t see anymore,” an anonymous narrator says in a YouTube clip entitled “Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop - Open 1929 and still going strong.” In shaky footage, filmed in 1991 at the Jewish-style lunch counter near the Flatiron Building, a couple of good-natured soda jerks indulge questions about their work between answering calls on a rotary phone and shovelling ice into plastic cups, dutifully maintaining a disappearing way of life.

Thirty years later, the rotary phone needs a new ringer and the place is under new management, and yet: the prognosis for that old New York flavor is good. If Eisenberg’s never achieved the international acclaim of, say, Katz’s or the Carnegie Deli, it earned a cult following with its tuna melts and matzo-ball soup, and, more important, by never seeming to change a smidge. When, in 2021, the building’s landlord sought a new tenant to carry the torch (the previous one reportedly defaulted on the rent), dozens applied. From among them, the finest possible victors emerged: Eric Finkelstein and Matt Ross, the sandwich experts and playful nostalgists behind Court Street Grocers and the HiHi Room.