{"id":259488,"date":"2026-06-08T18:24:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T18:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/259488\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T18:24:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T18:24:24","slug":"from-sturgeon-to-knicks-gear-barney-greengrass-has-you-covered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/259488\/","title":{"rendered":"From Sturgeon to Knicks Gear, Barney Greengrass Has You Covered"},"content":{"rendered":"

Moe Greengrass is an entrepreneurial young man of nineteen and the heir to what is arguably the finest appetizing establishment in the city. One day, he will inherit the throne at Barney Greengrass, a smoked-fish emporium on Eighty-sixth and Amsterdam, just across the street from the Belnord, a limestone pile where the late Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote his last short stories in Yiddish and rent-controlled splendor. For lunch, Singer liked the smoked lake sturgeon.<\/p>\n

Groucho Marx, Alfred Hitchcock, Jascha Heifetz, Marilyn Monroe\u2014they all knew from Barney Greengrass. Irving Berlin ordered four quarts of borscht there every week. In Philip Roth\u2019s novel \u201cOperation Shylock,\u201d the narrator, a stand-in for Roth, requests \u201cthe chopped-herring salad on a lightly toasted onion bagel\u201d\u2014a credible order. James\u00a0J. Frawley, a Tammany Hall pol and loyal customer in the nineteen-thirties, gave Barney Greengrass its royalist imprimatur: \u201cThe Sturgeon King.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moe, the sturgeon dauphin, is an impassive fellow with a fantastic shock of red hair. What he doesn\u2019t already know about whitefish is not worth knowing. A student at N.Y.U., he can be seen in the store on weekends helping his dad, an irrepressible kibbitzer named Gary, at the register. Father and son are surrounded by clear plastic boxes of halvah, rugelach, and babka. The perfume of smoked fish\u2014nova and sturgeon, the humble herring, the aristocratic sable\u2014permeates the air. \u201cEven the wallpaper smells like fish and onions,\u201d Moe says. The beloved Greengrass wallpaper, with its incongruous scenes of old New Orleans, has been absorbing the smell for many decades. During the pandemic, Gary called in a team of decorative artists to repair the damage of time. They worked on the wallpaper as if they were reviving a faded Caravaggio.<\/p>\n

Moe\u2019s grandfather and namesake was both a master slicer and an amateur magician. When Moe the Elder died, in 2002, the comedian and loyal customer Paul Reiser sent the family a condolence letter in which he tenderly remarked, in Gary\u2019s recollection, \u201cMoe was the only man who could pull a three of clubs out of a herring\u2019s ass.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barney Greengrass lands in the Times Top One Hundred restaurants as reliably as Atomix and Le Bernardin. Thanks to the quality of the fish, word of mouth, foreign guidebooks, and now Moe\u2019s exertions on Instagram, there are long lines at the door, especially on weekends. Gary took a stab at expanding years ago; he had an outlet in the now-shuttered Barneys department store, in Beverly Hills. Moe entertains far grander dreams. \u201cI want to grow the brand,\u201d he said, in the parlance of his studies in hospitality.<\/p>\n

\"Couple<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cCome on in and make yourselves at home, and try not to let all of our pet chameleons bother you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cartoon by Drew Dernavich<\/p>\n

But give him time. He is just getting started and has yet to persuade his dad to expand downtown, much less to Kentucky and Kuala Lumpur. In the short term, he is all about marketing. An avid Knicks fan, he has kept tabs on the excitement all over town\u2014storekeepers putting televisions in their windows so people can watch on the sidewalk, fans on the subway complimenting one another on vintage jerseys. On the crosstown bus, Knicks people exchange glances, not of annoyance or seduction but of fandom, of common cause: \u201cWait\u2019ll we get the Spurs to the Garden!\u201d Strangers fall into hushed conversation about the state of Jalen Brunson\u2019s knee and Mitchell Robinson\u2019s pinkie. Predictions are offered, shy fist bumps exchanged.<\/p>\n

Moe tuned in to the vibe and decided, \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get in on the fun. I mean, people love us and they love the Knicks. So\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d With Gary\u2019s say-so, he went into action, ordering up batches of black-and-white cookies that would now be colored blue and orange. (The sugar content, along with a cup of Gary\u2019s rocket-fuel coffee, will keep you up through the playoffs and into next season.) More imaginatively, Moe designed a T-shirt that combines the imagery of Neptune, the god of the sea, with Brunson, the lord of the Garden. They have been selling like, well, hot latkes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an honor to name Moe for Moe,\u201d Gary said the morning after the Knicks\u2019 big win on the road in Game 1. \u201cMy father would have kvelled about the T-shirts. He might have teased him and said, \u2018What are you doing fooling around with T-shirts!\u2019 But he would have been proud.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it happens, the Greengrass dynasty has a historical link to the Knicks. Irving Mitchell Felt, a developer who was instrumental in building the \u201cnew\u201d Garden, used to come around the store and give out tickets for prime seats. Gary remembers going to the first Knicks game at the arena, in February, 1968. \u201cI even remember the price,\u201d he said. \u201cTwo sturgeon sandwiches and fifteen bucks. A pretty good deal.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Moe Greengrass is an entrepreneurial young man of nineteen and the heir to what is arguably the finest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259489,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[97134,100975,1472,9,11,10,49,51,50,11004],"class_list":["post-259488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-_talk-of-the-town","tag-legacy-dept","tag-magazine","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-splitscreenimageleftinset"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}