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Good Enough to Eat, the Upper West Side brunch institution that’s been drawing sidewalk lines for 45 years, is closing. Owner Jeremy Wladis told ILTUWS that the restaurant will serve its final brunch on Sunday, August 30.
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The restaurant sits at 520 Columbus Avenue at West 85th Street, and for more than four decades it’s been the place where tourists showed up with a guidebook in hand and where a generation of neighborhood kids grew up on pancakes and strawberry butter.“It’s not really a goodbye,” Wladis said. Fred’s, his sister restaurant at 476 Amsterdam Avenue at West 83rd Street, will take on the Good Enough to Eat breakfast menu Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fred’s will also start opening at 9 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays instead of 11 a.m., and its lunch and brunch menus will fold in a number of Good Enough to Eat favorites alongside the existing Fred’s dishes.
What isn’t moving is the name. Wladis said he doesn’t plan to bring the Good Enough to Eat brand across the street, only the food. “I confuse people when I do two brands,” he said.
As for what prompted the decision, he pointed to a business that no longer works the way it once did. “It’s hard to really make money in this environment,” he said. “We used to be this crazy tourist place, and we’re in all the guidebooks, and we’re not in any of those things anymore.” A large share of the restaurant’s business used to come from visitors, he said, “and there really aren’t many tourists on the Upper West Side.” He also noted that the printed guidebooks that once sent a steady stream of first-timers through the door have largely been replaced by phones.
The lease was the other half of it. Wladis said his lease is up and that he and the landlord couldn’t agree on what the space is worth. “The landlord thinks it’s worth a lot more money than I do, and we can’t come to a decision,” he said. “I just think it’s time to move from that space.”
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Good Enough to Eat opened in 1981 on Amsterdam Avenue, the creation of chef Carrie Levin, who wrote two cookbooks built around the restaurant’s home-style American cooking. It moved to its Columbus Avenue home in 2013 after Levin partnered with Wladis to keep it alive when her Amsterdam Avenue lease wasn’t renewed. Levin later retired, and she died in 2023 at the age of 65..Wladis expects the next two weeks to be busy, and he expects them to be emotional. “So many people have met their friends or wives or husbands there, or their children grew up there,” he said. “Everywhere I go, people see my card or something and know that I’m part of Good Enough to Eat. They love it, and [it’s] sad, really sad. But it was a business decision.”
The last brunch is Sunday, August 30.
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