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New York has lost plenty of neighborhood institutions over the years, but this one may hit particularly hard for anyone with strong feelings about pancakes and strawberry butter.
Good Enough to Eat, a longtime Upper West Side brunch favorite known for its homey American cooking and weekend crowds, is closing after 45 years in business. The restaurant at 520 Columbus Avenue will serve its final brunch on Sunday, August 30.
It first opened in 1981, when chef Carrie Levin launched Good Enough to Eat on Amsterdam Avenue. Then, it moved a few blocks north to West 83rd Street before relocating to its current home on Columbus Avenue in 2013. Over the decades, it became an Upper West Side stalwart, attracting neighborhood regulars and tourists alike for plates of comfort food, including bacon-studded waffles, cinnamon-swirl French toast, omelets, buttermilk biscuits and, perhaps most famously, pancakes slathered with a signature strawberry butter.
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The restaurant moved to its current Columbus Avenue location in 2013 after Levin partnered with restaurateur Jeremy Wladis to keep the business going when its Amsterdam Avenue lease wasn’t renewed. (Levin later retired and died in 2023 at age 65.) This time around, Wladis told I Love the Upper West Side that both business conditions and the expiration of another lease factored into the decision. He said the restaurant no longer attracts the volume of tourists it once did, while he and the landlord were unable to agree on the value of a new lease.
“The landlord thinks it’s worth a lot more money than I do and we can’t come to a decision,” Wladis told the outlet. “I just think it’s time to move from that space.”
There is, however, a bit of good news for anyone already contemplating a strawberry-butter withdrawal: much of the food isn’t disappearing. Fred’s, Wladis’s sister restaurant at 476 Amsterdam Avenue, will begin serving Good Enough to Eat’s breakfast menu Monday through Friday from 8 am to 4 pm. Fred’s will also open earlier on weekends, at 9 am instead of 11 am and fold a number of Good Enough to Eat favorites into its existing lunch and brunch menus.
The Good Enough to Eat name itself won’t make the move, though. “It’s not really a goodbye,” Wladis said.
Still, after more than 40 years of breakfasts, August 30 is the end of an era for the Upper West Side. If you want one last meal inside Good Enough to Eat itself, you have less than two weeks to get those pancakes (and plenty of strawberry butter) while you still can.