Cafe Edison

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This venue is closed.

You could easily walk by Cafe Edison at Times Square’s Hotel Edison and dismiss it as your ordinary, non-descript coffee shop. You’d be wrong. Hidden amid the obligatorily encyclopedic offering of omelettes, burgers, club sandwiches, and salads are gems of homemade Eastern European Jewish cooking that have delighted Broadway producers, playwrights, and performers, and tourists, for 30 years—at timelessly affordable prices. The soups, which alternate daily, are exceptional. Matzo ball soup sports a delicate sphere nestled among egg noodles and generous chunks of chicken; mushroom barley is teeming with fresh mushrooms and dill; split pea is thick and barely puréed; and cabbage soup, delightfully sweet and sour, contains pieces of beef brisket and potatoes. Lightly fried blintzes are bulging with slightly sweetened cheese, cherries, or blueberries. Kasha varnishkas have the proper buckwheat to bowtie ratio and are enriched with fried onions. Try the matzo brei, an eggy version of French toast made with matzo (unleavened bread). Sure, the acoustics amplify every clanking plate, and the embellishments of this former ballroom are a crazy quilt of contemporary and Baroque styles. But you won’t hear anyone kvetching—they’re too busy eating. — Michael Anstendig

Matzo ball soup, $4.10; cheese blintzes, $7.50; kasha varnishkas, $4.95