Rokhl’s Golden City: Khanike Gift List for the Yiddishist In Your Life

Can an oyster dinner be heymish? Maybe when it’s at the swank yet unpretentious Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station. Hear me out. A few nights ago your humble correspondent was fruitlessly applying herself to some research at the New York Public Library when a text came in from Congress for Jewish Culture Director Shane Baker. Did I want to get an oyster pan roast? I sure did. Do I even like oysters? I sure don’t. No matter. A five-minute scrum through the holiday crowds and Shane and I were being seated at the famed Oyster Bar.

The Oyster Bar is located in a cavernous space in the lower level of Grand Central Terminal. It opened its doors in 1913, the same year as Grand Central itself. It’s the kind of place that feels like it should have sawdust on the floors but doesn’t. That old-New-York, frozen-in-time (not the prices, though) feeling makes the Oyster Bar deliciously heymish. Sure, they had plenty of bivalves in honor of the first graduating class of Hebrew Union College in 1883. But no one would ever call the infamous Trefa Banquet heymish. But a solid hour’s wait for one’s dinner, unaccompanied by a single explanation, let alone apology? Very, very heymish. You dig?

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