Dobos in Paradise

I have a picture, taken on March 14, 2020, of the exterior of the Hungarian Pastry Shop. A splash of sun is hitting the front patio tables where two couples are seated in light coats, but the honey locust is still bare. There’s not a mask in sight, and it might be any strangely warm early spring day this millennium, except that in the foreground, a pair of young women in Columbia-blue caps and gowns are standing hesitantly at a discreet distance from the door. Having been informed that their campus was shutting down and anticipating the consequences, they’d thrown on their graduation regalia and walked over to the place that really mattered for what was going to be their only ceremony. As such, they were observing it in true commencement tradition: being unsure whether or not you want to risk crossing the threshold. Everything about the picture says, Here’s a world that’s still just about intact.

I took it as an anticipatory souvenir. As the grandson of a Greek emigrant restaurant owner, culturally primed to be alert for signs of business (and civilizational) failure, I was certain the ensuing weeks of compulsory isolation would sweep the Hungarian away. The shop had always thrived on its enclosure, its tight, Wi-Fi-less, musicless quarters where writing and gossipy intellectual talk could operate almost shoulder to shoulder—bookishly eccentric and unventilated. If you’d started to doom-spiral the way I did, you too might have extended that sense of an ending to the other institutions (publishing, academia) that the shop had always hosted.

So much for ancestral wisdom, I guess. If they felt the same Hellenic fatalism, the Greek American Binioris family, owners since 1976 of this putatively Hungarian locale, got lucky—or they knew better. Two forces rallied to save the shop: local devotion and online/tourist mythicization. Takeout lines formed throughout the spring and early summer; the Times ran a besotted profile; and then gradually, posts and reels and TikToks, a circulating repertoire of tastefully lit images, turned the Hungarian into a metonym for Writer’s New York. It was all very bizarre, this unaccustomed exhibitionism, as if the shop had turned itself inside out, but it worked. Even if you regretted its new media–age halo, you had to admit its necessity.

Adoration, though, is a kind of pressure too. All that exteriorization, not to mention the constant adjusting-to-conditions of the pandemic, highlighted the actual exterior’s deterioration. Now, five years on, a renovation proposed by the design studio New Affiliates in 2023 is complete, and it’s a savvy compromise attempting to do justice to both of the forces that kept this institution alive—its sheltered out-of-timeness and its openness to the fetishes of online publicity—by keeping reality and image compartmentalized, if only by the thinness of its glossy new shell.

Outside, then, the revised image: A flatter, brighter façade with ventilated panels replaces the rusting door and window frames that had admitted light only grudgingly and air only accidentally. The up-to-date, insulated storefront is startling at first in its starkness, even with the reinstallation of the shop’s signature red-and-white-striped awning, which in its new, higher pitch leaves more open to view. The storefront has the virtue of not being at all precious. You know what it’s up to, which is less to be seen than seen through. It advertises a contemporary kind of permanence, that of investment. At the same time, the new exterior is an allegory of impermanence. Gone are the fading, time-damaged late-1970s murals of Thessaloniki-born artist Yanni Posnakoff, once a part-owner of the shop, that rooted the Hungarian not only in a time but also in the neighborhood; his Blakean angels with their inscrutable holy-stoned gazes, found also in the nearby Greek restaurant Symposium, established a style you might call Demotic Morningside Heights. What has replaced them is a mosaic, consisting of three-quarter-inch glass tiles framing the shop’s service door, that serves as a tribute. Its design merges enlarged details from two of the original murals, transliterating hippie-Byzantine icons into a digitally scanned iconicity. The result is an intense, metallic wash color—cobalt and crimson and a vein of gold—producing a feeling of blur. Tellingly, the pair of faces chosen for memorialization have averted gazes; all the Posnakoff angels have coalesced into the angel of history, looking elsewhere at everything that was lost, including themselves. The renovation knows. It knows how we hold on to memories now: by using thumb and forefinger to expand the jpeg until it pixelates, wanting to reenter the frame so badly you lose the ability to see what was there.

Inside, however: preservation. The retooled façade is also the enclosure of a terrarium. Some details that the old display windows pushed to the margins have been effaced, most notably a Chagall-like frieze by Posnakoff that ran above the threshold, and a narrow, vertical strip of brick wall at the northern corner by the window has been exposed. Otherwise, the interior is essentially untouched, as if some jealous god were appeased by a little sacrifice. It’s somewhat brighter now—those windows reckon with the outside more frankly—but it’s kept a clement, inward-turned dimness bound to disappoint anyone searching for “dark academia.” The wall paint is still chipped, the unsteady tables remain in their identical configuration, and Posnakoff’s visual idiom, in menu lettering up front and framed landscapes around the back, still dominates. The pastries (I recommend the almond horn) have kept their old-world honesty, in that they don’t have the hyperreal glaze of something produced for a camera. The Author’s Wall of framed covers of books written at the Hungarian’s tables, ranging from poetry and fiction to academic monograph, and with authors’ names both obscure and well-known (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rivka Galchen, Nathan Englander), still advertises the shop as a place of quiet production—part boast, part reminder to observe the local niceties.

So the shop carries on, a condition wrested from the fame that might’ve threatened it, as a game preserve of the word. In the afternoon and early evening it pulses with eager, figuring-life-out youthful conversation, but earlier in the day it’s most itself. Before 10 a.m. on a weekday the low hum of an academic neighborhood enclave persists. The scruffy, donnish middle-aged regulars, dotted with a few self-conscious students, sit over coffee to write or grumble about the news or make notes in a book’s margin. Then the tour buses arrive across the avenue, at the Cathedral. An enfilade of European visitors enters with the mounting late-morning light. The Author’s Wall awaits its daily Instagramming. The regulars squint it away as best we can. We’re preserved curiosities now, icons of ourselves: the price of our survival.