Unpacked, Five Questions: The Secret Life of New York’s Oldest Businesses

On this episode of Unpacked, Five Questions, host Katherine LaGrave sits down with writer Harrison Hill, who for his latest Afar feature celebrating New York City’s 400th birthday, embarked on a borough-hopping journey to visit the oldest family-owned businesses across all five boroughs—from record stores and restaurants to bars and delis beloved by locals.

Harrison reveals how these century-old institutions survive by constantly evolving while maintaining their authentic character, and shares his surprising discoveries about the precarity and resilience of New York’s most iconic establishments. He also opens up about approaching his home city of 19 years as a travel destination for the first time.

Transcript

Katherine LaGrave, host: Welcome to Unpacked, Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story. I’m Katherine LaGrave, executive editor at Afar. I’m pretty lucky. I get to brainstorm, assign, and edit features for our print magazine. And I get to work with writers who have an ear for incredible travel stories.

Harrison Hill is one of those writers. Harrison and I first met years ago to talk magazines at one of my favorite local haunts, the Hungarian Pastry Shop. It is one of the oldest literary cafes in New York City, and dangerously close to my apartment. (Get the cheese and cherry strudel.)

Since then, Harrison has written for New York Magazine, GQ, Vogue, and the Guardian, and been working on his first book, The Oracle’s Daughter, which is forthcoming from Scribner. He’s very busy! But for his latest Afar feature, Harrison returned to the Hungarian Pastry Shop—not literally, but in idea, anyway.

To celebrate New York City’s 400th birthday, he traveled all of the five boroughs to visit some of the oldest record stores, restaurants, bars, and delis beloved by locals. The result is a rollicking tale that left him appreciating the city he’s called home for 19 years in a whole new way.

Harrison, hello. So nice to see you again.

Harrison Hill: So nice to see you too, Katherine. Thank you so much for having me here.

Katherine: So New York City is celebrating its 400th birthday this year, and your story focuses on the oldest family owned businesses that make up the city. And I love the celebration of these icons, as we’ll call it. And in your opinion, why are places like this important to New York City?

Harrison: Yeah, you know, this is a question you and I were thinking about as we began brainstorming the different places we wanted to go for this story. And you know, so much of New York is about change, evolution, what’s new, what’s hot, what’s fresh. These businesses, of course, are on the face of it, not hot and fresh. They’re the ones who’ve like lasted forever and ever. And so I kind of think of them as the foundation of the city. The, the places that we know can, are always gonna be there or that we hope are always gonna be there. And that from that kind of base, sort of new and different kind of things can spring.

One of the really surprising and interesting things that I found working on this story is that these institutions that we think of, as I was saying, as sort of foundational, institutional, not changing, are in fact always changing, and that’s part of what has made them able to survive.

You know, think about Katz’s Deli, which is one of the most iconic locations in all of New York City, where tourists are going, locals go. We think of that as kind of unchanging and permanent. It’s like you go there for the pastrami, you go there for the matzoh ball soup. But when I was talking to one of the owners, he was talking to me about this new slash old dish actually that is a vegan dish and that can, you know, appeal to diners who are themselves vegan or vegetarian. And so they, they do change with the time. They do respond to whatever is going on in the culture and what customers demand.

But you know, actually to that example more specifically, what’s interesting is that it actually is an old dish. It’s not a new thing that they themselves have created recently. It’s something that they would’ve had like a hundred years ago when the place was beginning. Then took it off the menu for many decades ’cause there wasn’t really a market for it. And then here we are now where there really is a market.

Katherine: Oh, that’s great. So for this story, you went to all five boroughs and you live in Brooklyn, which you say in the story. What is the borough that you want to spend more time in and why?

Harrison: Yeah. I mean, the answer is definitely Staten Island and you know, I found these amazing little locations, well, I didn’t find them. You and I brainstormed together before going out there, like this place called the Basilio Inn, which is this Italian restaurant tucked away on the, in this almost suburban street hidden away. You would just have no idea there was anything there. And yet tucked away is this sort of perfect prototypically like New York, Staten Island Italian restaurant. And so I also discovered that it’s very easy to get there from my own apartment here in Brooklyn. I just can hop on the R train I think it is, and then get on a bus and go over the Verrazzano Bridge.

And so obviously I should have known that it was easy to get there from that bus, but. You know, we get in our habits, we have this sort of grooves of experience that we get stuck in. And so I just had no reason to get over there other than wonderfully this story. Um, so yeah, places like the Basilio and the, the New Asha restaurant, which is this sort of perfect, um, Sri Lankan restaurant, I’d love to go back and, and, and visit those places. And so, yeah, Staten Island for sure.

Katherine: Well, can’t you also play, you can also play bocce, is that right? At the Basilio Inn—that’s something, yeah, that we talked about.

Harrison: Yeah, so there’s, there’s behind the, um, restaurant, there is just this sort of like stretch of, I think it’s grass where yeah, you can play bocce and, and people have been able to play bocce there for, for many years. I believe when I was there actually it was. It was pretty quiet and there was no one there playing bocce, but the bocce season had not yet begun. Yeah, no, that’s like a fun little activity you can do over there.

Katherine: That’s the next trip then. So you brought me beautifully to food. You shared that your fridge was just filled with leftovers after all of this reporting and when it comes to New York, people tend to think of bagels, pizza. They think of hot dogs. What was something that you ate that you would recommend to travelers?

Harrison: I mean, not to just repeat myself, but the New Asha Sri Lankan restaurant was just perfect. It was this dish called kodu roti, which is sort of a standard iconic Sri Lankan dish. So I would recommend that I, I. I don’t know if I can recommend a, if this, if beer applies to your question, but I think the beer at the Bohemian Beer Garden in Queens was lovely and you know, as much as the beer itself was lovely, what was really lovely was the environment was this like sort of beautiful open air courtyard with all these linden trees and children playing around. And so, you know, environment affects how we taste things. It is part of a culinary appeal. And so I think of Bohemian Beer Gardens, beer as being both delicious and then kind of enhanced by everything around it.

What else? I mean the, the baklava at the Damascus Bakery, uh, on Atlantic Avenue. Frankly, just a couple blocks from my apartment, a place that I run by all the time. It’s just part of my kind of daily routine going on a run to the water and running by this bakery. The variety of the baklava is sort of astonishing. It’s like stringy and in squares and triangles. You know, the honey’s kind of dripping from it, and it’s a place that’s just full of, you know, real, real New Yorkers, just people dropping in for a treat or a lunch or a lentil soup or something like that. So those would be a couple of my recommendations. But I mean, there are infinite recommendations for sure.

Katherine: Well, I have to say I went to Damascus for the first time the other day actually, I was in the neighborhood and I was like, oh, it’s right there. It’s right there. And so I went in and got some baklava as well.

Harrison: Oh good. What kind, what kind did you get?

Katherine: I got pistachio and I think it was a walnut triangle. So pretty typical. Um, but I came away with, you know, I was asking one of the co-owners for his recommendations and he’s like, what else? What else? So I ended up with the full bag of things.

Harrison: So one of the locations that we brainstormed that didn’t end up making its way into the piece at all was about the City Hall subway station, which was obviously not a small business or a restaurant. And so that was part of why it didn’t end up in the piece. But it was the first subway station in New York City to open, you know, many decades ago. And there’s this wild thing that you can do, which is like semi illicit, but not really, and it’s really fun, which is if you hop on the 6 train at about 14th street or so, which for those of you who don’t live in New York City, is a a local train that generally goes up to the Upper East Side or along the Upper East, along the east side of Manhattan. If you hop on the 6 train and go downtown, the train will end at the City Hall subway station, which is in fact not the original city hall station. It’s a new one that has been constructed to fit the, the larger, more modern, modern trains. But if you stay on the train, once the conductor’s like, “Everybody get off the train, you need to go home, like this is the end of the line.”

If you stay there and kind of duck down, the train will begin again. It sort of, and it starts to make this big loop and it’s sort of dark, it’s sort of dim. But if you peek up while you’re kind of hiding there, you can see the original City Hall station and you know, of course it’s very grimy and gritty and really, you know, would need a cleanup. But if this great way to see this sort of secret, I mean truly secret, hidden gem. I mean, someone I was reading said it’s sort of the, the worst kept secret in New York City. Everybody kind of knows about it, but I would certainly recommend doing it.

And like, you know, it’s funny, there was a moment where when I was drafting the piece, you know, before you saw it or anything, that was the beginning of the piece was me kind of like crouched in the subway, hiding and peeking out and looking at this funny sort of origin story spot for New York City. It was really fun to do that.

Katherine: I would love to read that version as well sometimes. So history is really important to the story. People are also such an important part of the story. And you met so many new ones. One of them is Mike Amedeo of Casa Amedeo in the Bronx. Tell me a little bit about who he is and your time with him.

Harrison: Yeah. Mike is this wonderful kind of true blue like New York City feisty character who, he is from Puerto Rico originally and moved to New York City, worked in the business music business, running a music label. He himself is a musician and he ended up taking over this Latin music store that’s on the Upper East Side. Um, no, sorry, not the Upper East Side. It’s up in the Bronx. It’s like north of the Upper East side. It’s the upper, upper, upper East side. So, although I, you know, the folks in the Bronx would certainly object to calling it that.

He’s 91 years old. He’s got this big cuff of big white hair, and when I went, it was actually the first place I visited in the course of reporting this story. So I was still sort of getting my footing a little bit, and I went in and it’s this store that’s just sort of overstuffed with t-shirts and records and CDs and, um, you know, guitars and maracas and things like that. And Mike is this impresario of the whole thing. And he’s like guiding people as they come in and talking to customers.

And so it was actually really hard for me to get and in to talk to him. You know, I, I’d called ahead and we’d arrange a time for me to come and speak, but there were too many fans, too many people who wanted to come by. Perhaps to buy a CD, but frankly more because they wanted to see Mike, who’s this sort of local celebrity.

I mean, I mentioned this in the piece, but there was this wonderful moment where I was talking to him and this stranger just popped in from off the street and said like, “Hey Mike, we love you. Like you’re the mayor. You’re the best.” And I thought like, wow. You can’t plan a a moment like that any better. I mean, if I were to—it just sounds like it’s fake, but I’m here to tell you it was real.

So yeah, Mike, he’s, he’s a true New York character and it’s also like he, there was a sense of celebration of music for sure, but he also has a, a kind of rye pessimism that I feel like is an element of like, new Yorkness as we think about it. Just like, ah, “Business isn’t good enough and this then and the other, I dunno what’s gonna happen in the store once I pass away.”

And New York isn’t all celebration. It’s, it’s like a little bit of that bite too. I mean, part of what I was excited about this piece when I began writing it is that, you know, as we said at the beginning, New York is a very familiar city to me. I, I, I know it or rather I think I know it. And something so special about going into the city where you live and approaching it as I would approach any destination that I was writing about. That is to say, as somebody who doesn’t live there and is eager to find these kind of telling details that get to the heart of a place.

You know, if when I’m on my way to work and things, I just, you know, I’ve got my book and my phone and just looking out the subway window and I’m in my rhythm. This really broke that in a wonderful way. I learned on a sort of purely prosaic level, I learned about all these wonderful restaurants I’d never been to like those in Staten Island. I, I learned about, um, the size of the city, like this was something, it’s just, it’s so big and you know, that’s sort of blunt, stupid thing to say, but goodness, like I really got a sense of that going from my apartment in Brooklyn to Eddie’s, this like incredible old ice cream shop deep in Queens. I mean, it took me an hour to get there and the subway was not stop and go. It was not slow. It was at full speed.

And then same thing, I went up to the New York Botanic Garden, which didn’t end up in the piece. And you know, that took forever. And you just get a sense of like, wow, this place is gigantic. If we’re talking more about the kind of spiritual life of the city, like what is in its soul that I learned about? I think I learned, well, I’ll start by saying that I learned about the kind of precarity of it all. It’s all, it’s all a little bit more unstable than we think it is.

Like I’m really struck by this woman, Chrizette Woods, who’s the daughter of Sylvia, the eponymous founder of Sylvia’s restaurant in Harlem, which is this like, you know, the prototypical soul food restaurant in New York City, if not America. I was so struck by when I spoke with her, she said, you know, if we hadn’t owned our building, we wouldn’t, or we might not have survived COVID. And that statement really took me by surprise because Sylvia’s, it’ll always be there. It’s just like part of, again, the foundation, but that’s just not true. And that these in institutions require generation after generation of people who both wanna maintain what makes the place great and you know, evolve with the times.

Same thing at Katz’s Deli. The pandemic was a really, like a really, you know, for, as, as with all restaurants, it was a really traumatic and, you know, potentially existentially difficult, um, situation. And there, you know, Katz’s Deli is, is Katz’s Deli, you know, the famous institution. And it’s also like a great deli down on Halton Street that people love, but it’s vulnerable to the same forces that every restaurant is vulnerable to.

And then I guess most deeply about the people, they’re eager to talk. Maybe this isn’t a specifically New York thing, but I think we have this characterization of New Yorkers as kind of gruff and reluctant to say anything. Just really in their own little worlds, which to be fair is very often true. But behind that gruff exterior, they want to talk, they wanna brag. They wanna say like, oh yeah, this is the best bar, this is the best restaurant this is, this is it. If I met a store like the ones that we profiled in the story, why not just like go up and say, wait, what’s the history of this place? Do you all own the building? What do you think has made it survive all these years? All the same questions I was asking people as I reported. Why not just ask them in my everyday life?

Katherine: I love that. And what suggestions, advice do you have for people who aren’t New Yorkers for travelers coming to the city and the ways in which they engage and move through it?

Harrison: Hmm. Well, the first thing I would say was, this was the first piece I of advice I got that I can remember at least when I moved to New York City in, I believe, I guess it was 2006, I was a student at NYU and I remember it was the first week on campus and I someone said, “OK, this is the one thing you have to know. Always look both ways before you cross a one way street.” And like, goodness, that is true. I’ve just been saved so many times by that kind of mantra running through my mind, it’s only gotten more and more true and more necessary as, as like the bikes and the deliveries have gone way up. So I would give that piece of advice.

I think I would also, I, you know, most people when they come to New York, they, they stay in Manhattan, which I mean, I goodness, I certainly understand. And when I visited New York before I lived here, that was my experience as well. But I would say, yeah, get out in the different boroughs. Get a little lost hop on a bus. I mean, goodness, like, Katherine, you probably hate taking the bus as much as I do, but if you’re not like insistent on getting somewhere because goodness knows the bus is not gonna get you there in any kind of speedy amount of time, I think a bus is a good way to just kind of get taken wherever you go.

So maybe that’s the kind of overarching thing I would say. Have a few places in mind that you wanna see that you want to go, because it certainly is helpful to have a bit of an itinerary in mind, but also just wander and. See what you, see, what you find.

Katherine: And get out to all, certainly all the boroughs. You mentioned that about Staten Island, and admittedly it’s a borough that I visit the least frequently, partly because of where I live, but it’s easy enough to get to, and most people just sort of go take the Staten Island ferry to get a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. But this idea that the boroughs, I mean the neighborhoods, even the restaurants or businesses all hold their own communities and stories is what you really unlocked with this piece. And I love that.

Harrison: Yeah. And I mean, you mentioned the Staten Island ferry that I, that is always something I recommend to people. The Staten Island Ferry, A) is free. It gives you a view of this, the Statue of Liberty, but more than that, it’s a way to see Manhattan and to get a little bit of a sense of the geographic hugeness of this place.

Also, I just always think of Working Girl, which for my money is like by far the best movie about New York City of all time, which is about this woman from Staten Island who, who works on Wall Street, Melanie Griffith, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, Katherine, but it begins on the Staten Island ferry, watching all these people from Staten Island take the ferry to lower Manhattan. And anyways, when I take the Staten Island ferry, I always feel like I’m having my like, Working Girl moment. I’m like, yeah, New York is the best. Like, look at the water, look at the buildings. I can feel the air, I can smell the, the salt of the water.

Um, yeah. New Yorkers are invested in creating small communities here. It just takes so much more effort, I think, to find your people, find a community here than it does in maybe a, a smaller city or a town or something like that. You have to be really deliberate about it. And so I think that the hunger of people to create those spaces, the kind of effort people have to put in and the rewards of that. Yeah, all of that are in, in the mix of the city’s New Yorkness, I would say.

Katherine: Listener, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Unpacked: Five Questions. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to Harrison’s story and to his social media handles. Join me in October for another episode that takes you behind the scenes with our award-winning features writers. I’ll be speaking with Chris Colin, an Afar contributing writer who traveled to Botswana with his family to take one of the first safaris of its kind—by bike.

Ready for more interviews with travel writers? Visit afar.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok. We are @afarmedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great travel stories. Subscribing always makes that easy. And be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform.

It helps other travelers find it. This has been Unpacked: Five Questions, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene, Nikki Galteland, and Katherine LeGrave.