With Times Square shining brighter than ever, there’s no place for the lovably shabby. And so the Café Edison on West 47th Street, which has been feeding Jewish comfort food to Broadway for 34 years, will serve its last matzo ball in mid-December.
I hear the cafe’s owners pay their landlord, the Edison Hotel, $15,000 a month for a space that could fetch $50,000 today. You’d have to sell a lot of latkes to make that kind of nut.
With the end in sight, I invited three Edison regulars — Alan Eisenberg, former head of Actors Equity; producer Manny Azenberg (right) and Shubert chairman Philip Smith — to share their memories over lunch.
We sat in the roped-off area to the right of the front door in a booth that’s been Shubert territory since 1980.
“I have to say, I was one of the first people to eat here,” said Smith.
He knew the owner, Harry Edelstein, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, back when Edelstein ran a coffee shop in the Piccadilly Hotel. Edelstein told him he was going to open a new place at the Edison.
“You will come, Mr. Smith?” asked Edelstein.
“Of course, Harry!” Smith said.
Smith brought his boss, Bernard Jacobs, who ran the Shubert Organization. Then the most powerful man on Broadway, Jacobs fell in love with the place and ate lunch there — turkey breast, Russian dressing, rye bread on the side — for the rest of his reign (he died in 1996).
Jacobs’ nemesis was the powerful agent Sam Cohn, who ran his part of Broadway from the Russian Tea Room.
This prompted Harvey Sabinson, a press agent, to dub the Edison “The Polish Tea Room.”
The name stuck, but Harry, who died in 2009, and his wife, Frances, didn’t care for it. “Please don’t call it the Polish Tea Room, Mr. Smith,” Frances implored.
“Why not?” Smith asked. “You and Harry are Polish.”
“Yes,” he says she replied, “but Polish people are supposed to be dumb!”
The Polish, as it came to be called, immediately attracted showbiz people of all ranks. Jacobs conferred behind the rope with other powerful producers while stage managers and stagehands sat across the way in a small dining room. Actors, press agents and everybody else ate in the main room. Chorus kids dashed in between shows on matinee days to get soup.
Headliners seldom came (Orso was their place), though a few who grew up in the theater — Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, Lucie Arnaz, Nathan Lane — were regulars.
“It was hamische, home,” Azenberg says. “And it’s a great American success story. Two people without an education — Harry can’t cook, she makes cabbage soup — open the place and they’re gracious and kind and showbiz adopts them and we all come.”
Neil Simon (right), a regular, wrote a play about the Edison called “45 Seconds From Broadway.” Another regular, August Wilson, worked on his plays at a booth in the main room. After “45 Seconds” came out — and flopped — Wilson told Azenberg, “I should have written that play, not Neil. It was staring me in the face, but I didn’t know it.”
Jacobs made deals with union heads in his booth.
“Bernie and I used to meet here and discuss what we were going to talk about at labor negotiations the next day,” says Equity’s Eisenberg. “I guess you could call it our dress rehearsal before we put on our little show in front of everybody else.”
The Polish will soon be gone, destined to be replaced by an upscale joint.
But no matter how fancy the food is at the new place, it’ll never be as good as that matzo-ball soup.