Vendy Award winners aside, ask any midtown office worker about the general quality of corner-cart chow in New York City and you’ll get, at best, a shrug; at worst, a diatribe. According to David Katz in the Jewish Quarterly, though, the worst street-cart offender isn’t the stale, salty pretzel or the waterlogged hot dog but the mass-produced knish,
Katz’s article goes on to laud the rounded, fist-sized baked knishes of Yonah Schimmel’s, served up via dumbwaiter in a nearly century-old hole in the wall on Houston Street. Once surrounded by the small Jewish-owned businesses of the Lower East Side, now incongruously lodged between a Howard Johnson Express Hotel and the hip Sunshine Cinema, Yonah Schimmel’s is heavy on the pushcart-era charm (a charm that consists mostly of having stayed exactly the same for decades on end), but does authentic always mean tasty? Nope, say the wags over at New York magazine’s Grub Street, “Truth be told, the knishes at Yonah Schimmel’s are as bland as cotton and heavy as depleted uranium.”
Instead, they advise a subway ride out to Queens for the “flaky and delicate” knishes dished out at the newly expanded Knish Nosh, or to Brooklyn for the “unexpected sweetness” of the kasha version at Glatt Zone in Midwood.
Is a knish throwdown in the works? Be careful—those things could hurt somebody.
NYMag is right. Yonah Schimmel’s knishes are as good as wrapping a glob of leftover unflavoured mashed potatoes in a skin. It might be fresher made than the street cart ones, but then again anything is so that doesn’t say much. I’ll have to try Knish Nosh.
I have tried Knish Nosh and hands down they have the best knish in NY.
I grew up on the lower east side, when everything, including Yonah Schimmel’s fare, tasted delicious. Today, prices skyrocket
and you get poop. When Yonah Schimmels was Yonah Schimmels, 50 years ago and some, not only a potato knish with sour milk, but potato nik, was out of this world.
Where do all these crazy rumors come from? We are Gabila’s Knishes and we have been baking our delicious knishes for over 87 years! We sell over 15,000,000 Knishes a year and have sold over 1.2 BILLION since 1921. We moved from Brooklyn to Copiague, Long Island, New York in April 2006 to a much larger Bakery. We have a new webstore (www.gabilas.com) with over 54 products, including many varieties of Knishes, Cocktail Knishes, Souffles, vegetable cutlets, Fat-Free Items and much more. We plan to open a wholesale outlet store at our factory in late summer. See our website for more information.
Alan,
Gabila’s Knishes