Elephant & Castle’s Regulars Aren’t Ready to Say Good-bye

The howls of despair and rending of garments began last week. Among a certain type of tenured New Yorker — downtown in affect if not always in residence, artistically or bohemianly inclined, of a certain age, never leaving — the news spread quickly, as news of illness often does. Elephant & Castle (always with an ampersand, never an “and”), the beloved West Village restaurant, was close to the end. After 50 years on Greenwich Avenue, its final day will be this coming Sunday.

On a recent afternoon, as I sat over a Gold’n Green omelet (spinach and cheddar, in an admiral French-style roll), I watched Susan Kramer, a 60-something regular, read the closure notice outside, walk in, sit down, and burst into tears. “We’ve been coming here forever, for decades,” Kramer, who moved to New York from Miami Beach in 1976 to attend Parsons, told me. “It’s almost like a cocoon in here! Is it not cool enough? I’m sorry, this place is very cool. This place was cool before people knew what cool was.”

Elephant & Castle opened in 1974, the first restaurant in what would be a string of side-hustle restaurants owned by George Schwarz, who had fled Nazi Germany as a child and ended up a radiation oncologist at nearby St. Vincent’s. Schwarz bemoaned the lack of decent, affordable food in the neighborhood, and in the grand tradition of hobbyist restaurateurs — the New York equivalent of the gentleman farmer — he bought the café when it came up for sale. “I think in the beginning he wanted a place to get some good food,” his son, Mono Schwarz-Kogelnik, told me. “He was frustrated with what the hospital cafeteria had to offer.”

Elephant & Castle, named in homage to the London pub that gave its name to the London neighborhood, was less of a pub than a café and restaurant. It never had a bar, and this magazine once called it (oddly) a “perfect place to take a clergyperson.” It quickly became a low-key destination for ’70s-style New American cuisine. (Its flourishes of Merlot-ginger sauce, which endure to this day, are the sort that I also associate with the Silver Palate, the legendary gourmet takeaway shop of the same era uptown.) It was open all day — it served brunch when the word “brunch” still had to be explained to New York Times readers — and could be either a value or a treat, depending on how you played it. That early Times piece called out 21 different omelets on the menu including the Poor Woman’s with garlic croutons for $1.95. The late Mimi Sheraton once called theirs “the best cup of American coffee in the city.”

Ceramic elephants still dot the dark wood-paneled walls of the Castle, and the menu hasn’t changed all that much. You can still get many of the house classics (pasta with goat cheese and arugula, Caesar salad), burgers, and a number of omelets, though not the Poor Woman’s. The servers’ T-shirts read “J’adore Les Omelettes.” Isaac Mizrahi, one of Elephant & Castle’s most devoted regulars, told me he sometimes says that from the stage at his cabaret shows.

“It feels like the last really civilized place to eat in the city,” Mizrahi told me. (He especially appreciates that the music — Dave Brubeck on the afternoon I was there — is kept soothingly low.) Mizrahi is the kind of famous New Yorker who loved the place. CBS Sunday Morning’s Mo Rocca was a regular. Richard Howard, the late poet and translator, was devoted to it. Stories have been circulating about Victor Garber’s regular visits, or running into Wallace Shawn there. The filmmaker Bart Freundlich used to host breakfast meetings, said the chef Gary Kuschnereit. Sometimes his wife, Julianne Moore, came too. They sat among the regulars and local eccentric — like the apartment-building doorman who would come for lunch and arrange his table with photos of Hollywood starlets of the ’40s. (The restaurant still serves a dessert called Scarlett O’Hara’s Coffee Cantata, with coffee ice cream, raspberries, hot fudge, and whipped cream, and whatever Dick the Doorman’s leanings may have been, this kind of camp backbeat endeared it to the local gay community, which made up a significant portion of its fan base.)

Schwarz eventually opened a number of restaurants, among them One Fifth, where a young Keith McNally got his start (McNally recalled Schwarz as a passionate gourmand who would take staffers to three-star meals and review every particular but also as the man who took a swing at him at the Odeon, the restaurant he left One Fifth to found). Later on, there was the similarly beloved Noho Star, and later still, Schwarz bought Keens, the 140-year-old steakhouse on 36th Street, with its famous pipe-dangling ceiling. “I lived above Keens for years,” Schwarz-Kogelnik told me. “I actually went through the closed restaurant to get to my apartment, which is not something I would wish on most people.”

Schwarz died in 2016, and after the sale of Keens last year, Elephant & Castle is the last of his restaurants still owned by his estate. (There were, over the years, two other Elephant & Castles, on Prince Street and on Bond Street, as well as one in Dublin, but they have all closed or been sold.) It is also the last stronghold of people who worked for and knew Schwarz. Staff came and would often stay for years, and the estate’s executors are two former employees, who had to make the decision to close.

“It’s heartbreaking,” one of them, Bonnie Jenkins, told me. The restaurant had been losing money for years, even before the pandemic, a diminution that began when St. Vincent’s closed in 2010. Its hours are much shorter than they once were. The estate owns the 1910 building, but even without the pressure of a landlord, rising costs and fewer patrons eventually took their toll. The property has not yet been sold, Jenkins says, nor has the business and the name; the most devoted of the regulars have been working the phones, desperately trying to find a white knight to save the place. (McNally was approached; Danny Meyer sympathetically but politely declined.) They wonder about a GoFundMe, or some other crowd-sourced income. But the prevailing feeling among the staff is that the writing has been on the wall for some time, and the news has been received with sadness but not shock.

“In the end, it was just a matter of responsibility,” Jenkins said. “We just couldn’t keep going and going and losing and losing and losing. It’s a very small restaurant, and George never believed in ever compromising anything. It was the best of everything, because he wanted that for himself and the guest.” Kuschnereit, who first joined in 1988 and despite occasional sabbaticals over the years and will be in the kitchen till the last day, told me he’s never worked in a restaurant where the owner insisted on taste-testing every ingredient, price be damned. It’s always been Stilton in the fried-chicken salad, because no other blue cheese would do.

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