• The Pickle Guys

  49 Essex Street, 212-656-9739, www.nycpickleguys.com

  Alan Kaufman works some nine hours a day, six days a week, elbow-deep in pickle juice, and yet the 44-year-old owner of the Pickle Guys doesn’t have a sour bone in his body. Even his staff, most of whom joined him when their former employer, Guss’ Pickles, left Essex Street early last year, act as if life were a pickle party. The daily grind produces remarkably fresh stock, from new to fully soured, with that perfect snap and spray in every bite. Kaufman ran the show at Guss’, but when the owners changed location, he got the feeling they’d lost interest in the business. Taking a space just down the block from the old store was a brilliant move. Tourists still flock there, and the line goes up the street, especially right before Passover, when the horseradish is freshly grated from morning till night—by an employee wearing a gas mask..

From the 2004 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine