Yonah Shimmel's Knish Bakery
| Yonah Shimmel's Knish Bakery | |
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Yonah Shimmel's Knish Bakery
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 Location within Manhattan
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| Restaurant information | |
| Established | 1890 |
| Food type | Kosher bakery |
| Street address | 137 East Houston Street (between First Avenue and Second Avenue), in the Lower East Side, Manhattan |
| City | New York City, New York |
| Postal/ZIP code | 10002 |
| Country | United States |
| Coordinates | 40°43′23.23″N 73°59′24.51″W / 40.7231194°N 73.9901417°WCoordinates: 40°43′23.23″N 73°59′24.51″W / 40.7231194°N 73.9901417°W |
| Website | knishery.com |
Yonah Schimmel's Knish Bakery is a bakery and restaurant, located at 137 East Houston Street (between First Avenue and Second Avenue), in the Lower East Side, Manhattan, that has been selling knishes on the Lower East Side since 1890 from its original location on Houston Street.
As the Lower East Side has changed over the decades and many of its Jewish residents have departed, Yonah Schimmel's is one of the few distinctly Jewish businesses and restaurants that remain as a fixture of this largely departed culture and cuisine.
As cited in The Underground Gourmet, a review of Yonah Schimmel's in a collection of restaurant reviews by Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder, "No New York politician in the last 50 years has been elected to office without having at least one photograph showing him on the Lower East Side with a knish in his face."
About 1890, Yonah Schimmel, a Romanian immigrant, used a pushcart to start his knish bakery. As business grew, a small store on Houston Street was rented by Yonah and his cousin Joseph Berger. When Yonah left the business a few years later, Berger took over the business, retaining the original name. In 1910, the Bergers moved the business to the south side of Houston Street, at its current location. Yonah Schimmel's has been family owned since its inception and is currently operated by Yonah's great nephew, Alex Wolfman.
In 1995, the shop's then-owner, Sheldon Keitz, was implicated in a loan-sharking scheme. The shop was amongst the locations where loans were repaid.
It is as much a landmark as an eatery and has frequently been an artist's subject. A portrait of the Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery by Hedy Pagremanski (b. 1929) is in the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York. More recently it features in the 2009 Woody Allen film Whatever Works.
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