On The Corner, John Derbyshire reprints an article (a letter?) on the closing of Mocca, a well-loved Hungarian restaurant in my former neighborhood. A couple of excerpts:
Amid the holiday bustle along Second Avenue a few weeks ago, a handwritten note modestly signaled the closure of Mocca, the venerable Hungarian restaurant near 82nd Street on the Upper East Side. As is often the case with improvised goodbyes, the proprietors thanked their customers for their long years of patronage, and said little else. The note said nothing about what was being lost.Mocca, which spent more than 40 years on the same block, was a vestige of old Yorkville, the neighborhood of mostly German and Eastern European immigrants who settled the area more than a century ago. Even 20 years ago, the neighborhood was a thriving country unto itself, with its own restaurants, churches and schools, all filled with the sounds of the Old World.
...
In recent years, suffering competition with bars and restaurants that cater to the well-educated and well-employed young professionals who are the neighborhood's more recent arrivals, and the gradual attrition of their native clientele, the icons of old Yorkville have disappeared. Among the departed are Paprika Weiss, the Ideal Restaurant and the unmarked bar on 83rd Street that was run by an octogenarian named Else and whose walls were painted with garish murals of such classic bier hall themes as hiking and big blond girls.Still, the Heidelberg remains, while Schaller & Weber and the Hungarian Meat Market still churn out sausages. Even Mocca will carry on in a way, offering most of its old menu from the kitchen at Frankie's Restaurant down the street.
And on Fifth Avenue, a more gilded vision of Hapsburg culture has found a home in the Neue Gallerie, dedicated to the art of that period, along with good versions of Viennese klimttorte, strudel and schlag at the Café Sabarsky. But that cafe is three broad avenues and a world away from Yorkville.
Having eaten, shopped and consumed adult beverages at most of the places named, it's sad to hear of the attrition in the neighborhood. Still, Yorkville remains home to many Eastern European and German immigrants and their descendants, many of whom I was lucky enough to get to know.
By the way, while perhaps gilded, the Neue Gallerie and Café Sabarsky are very much worth a visit.
Posted by oscarjr at October 25, 2006 12:14 AM | TrackBack