But there are other forces at work, from skyrocketing rents to Starbucks hegemony, that are forcing coffee-shop owners like the Tsolkas brothers into retirement. The recession is part of the problem according to Pan Gregorian Enterprises, a purchasing co-op for coffee shops and diners that has 475 local members, revenues were down 20 percent last year. Sad but true: The classic New York coffee shop is fading fast.

Tracked down at his home in Queens later that week, John Tsolkas had little to say beyond “Nothing last forever.”Ī pastry tableau at Tom's Restaurant (made famous by Seinfeld). (“I’ve been eating at Happy Burger for twenty years, and one day they vanish without a word?” said Oscar Weizner, a regular who had taken refuge at a coffee shop down the block.) Happy Burger’s landlord, knowing he could get much higher rent from a new tenant, had offered the weary brothers an attractive buyout for the four years left on their lease. One Saturday at the end of June, regulars arrived to find the Tsolkas brothers gone, their restaurant gated and locked. The end would come much sooner than that. “When my lease ends in 2008-finish,” John Tsolkas promised that day. But just at the point when most small-business owners want to start collecting a payoff for decades of labor, their situation looked tougher than ever. Starting with a doughnut shop on Broadway, the brothers owned several classic coffee shops on the Upper West Side: a dozen or so booths, pastries under plastic covers, the mother of all menus, and a platoon of eccentric regulars.Īs New Yorkers have seen, dinermen work like mad, and the restaurant, on Broadway at 93rd Street, was the Tsolkases’ ticket to the middle class.

When they immigrated from a small town in Greece where only a few kids their age went to high school, they gravitated to a business that had drawn their unskilled countrymen since the turn of the century. America and diners have generally been good to the Tsolkas brothers. He and Gus had owned the Happy Burger for more than twenty years, and had been in the business since they arrived in the United States 37 years ago. Pinning the receiver between his shoulder and his ear while collecting a check and punching the cash register, Tsolkas answered, “Happy!”īut Tsolkas, who is 65, was far from happy.

One day last month, John Tsolkas stood behind the counter at the Happy Burger, the Upper West Side coffee shop he owned with his older brother Gus, taking down phone orders.

Cosmic cafe