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\n The restaurant, which has been open since the 1970s, will close this weekend.
\n Photo: Courtesy Elephant & Castle\n <\/p>\n
The howls of despair and rending of garments began last week. Among a certain type of tenured New Yorker \u2014\u00a0downtown in affect if not always in residence, artistically or bohemianly inclined, of a certain age, never leaving \u2014\u00a0the news spread quickly, as news of illness often does. Elephant & Castle<\/a> (always with an ampersand, never an \u201cand\u201d), the beloved West Village restaurant, was close to the end. After 50 years on Greenwich Avenue, its final day will be this coming Sunday.<\/p>\n On a recent afternoon, as I sat over a Gold\u2019n 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. \u201cWe\u2019ve been coming here forever, for decades,\u201d Kramer, who moved to New York from Miami Beach in 1976 to attend Parsons, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like a cocoon in here! Is it not cool enough? I\u2019m sorry, this place is very cool. This place was cool before people knew what cool was.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s. Schwarz bemoaned the lack of decent, affordable food in the neighborhood, and in the grand tradition of hobbyist restaurateurs \u2014 the New York equivalent of the gentleman farmer \u2014\u00a0he bought the caf\u00e9 when it came up for sale. \u201cI think in the beginning he wanted a place to get some good food,\u201d his son, Mono Schwarz-Kogelnik, told me. \u201cHe was frustrated with what the hospital cafeteria had to offer.\u201d<\/p>\n Elephant & Castle, named in homage to the London pub that gave its name to the London neighborhood, was less of a pub than a caf\u00e9 and restaurant. It never had a bar, and this magazine once called it<\/a> (oddly) a \u201cperfect place to take a clergyperson.\u201d It quickly became a low-key destination for \u201970s-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 \u2014\u00a0it served brunch when the word \u201cbrunch\u201d still had to be explained to New York Times readers \u2014\u00a0and could be either a value or a treat, depending on how you played it. That early Times piece<\/a> called out 21 different omelets on the menu including the Poor Woman\u2019s with garlic croutons for $1.95. The late Mimi Sheraton once called theirs<\/a> \u201cthe best cup of American coffee in the city.\u201d<\/p>\n Ceramic elephants still dot the dark wood-paneled walls of the Castle, and the menu hasn\u2019t 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\u2019s. The servers\u2019 T-shirts read \u201cJ\u2019adore Les Omelettes.\u201d Isaac Mizrahi, one of Elephant & Castle\u2019s most devoted regulars, told me he sometimes says that from the stage at his cabaret shows.<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels like the last really civilized place to eat in the city,\u201d Mizrahi told me. (He especially appreciates that the music \u2014 Dave Brubeck on the afternoon I was there \u2014 is kept soothingly low.) Mizrahi is the kind of famous New Yorker who loved the place. CBS Sunday Morning\u2019s Mo Rocca was a regular. Richard Howard, the late poet and translator, was devoted to it. Stories have been circulating about Victor Garber\u2019s 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 \u2014\u00a0like the apartment-building doorman who would come for lunch and arrange his table with photos of Hollywood starlets of the \u201940s. (The restaurant still serves a dessert called Scarlett O\u2019Hara\u2019s Coffee Cantata, with coffee ice cream, raspberries, hot fudge, and whipped cream, and whatever Dick the Doorman\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n Schwarz eventually opened a number of restaurants, among them One Fifth, where a young Keith McNally got his start<\/a> (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<\/a>, the restaurant he left One Fifth to found). Later on, there was the similarly beloved Noho Star, and later still, Schwarz bought Keens<\/a>, the 140-year-old steakhouse on 36th Street, with its famous pipe-dangling ceiling. \u201cI lived above Keens for years,\u201d Schwarz-Kogelnik told me. \u201cI actually went through the closed restaurant to get to my apartment, which is not something I would wish on most people.\u201d<\/p>\n