No egg. No cream. All Brooklyn.
The Great New York City Egg Cream
Egg creams. Delightfully misnamed, they have no egg and no cream. Frothy, chocolaty egg creams are the ultimate Brooklyn treat of my childhood. I think it’s still the greatest drink out there — similar to a chocolate ice-cream soda but not as sweet, similar to a milkshake but not as heavy, completely unlike anything else. Though to be fair, more than one in a day is way too much.
A real New York original
Most historians and NY Egg Cream savants agree that Louis Auster created the egg cream at his candy store in Brooklyn, sometime around 1890, or perhaps in the early years of the 20th century. Depending on whom you believe, Auster either owned as many as 5 Brooklyn candy stores, or he rented space in a building on the corner of 7th Street and 2nd Avenue in NY owned by the Harmatzes of Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant, another great New York food institution. He did not, however, call it an egg cream; the original name seems to be lost to history.
The ‘French source’ legend has it that in the 1880s, Boris Thomashefsky, a teenage singer and actor from an area now belonging to the…
