Rumor: Sammy’s Roumanian Closes Chrystie Street Dining Room
Jan. 2016
It certainly isn’t a happy new year here on the Lower East Side if rumors prove true that Sammy’s Roumanian is closed for good.
The Chrystie Street restaurant closed back in mid-March with the rest of the city during the initial pandemic lockdown. And now it appears they didn’t survive.
Photographers James and Karla Murray noted on Instagram that all the photographs and ephemera hanging in the entrance and on those storied walls were gone.
In operation since 1975, the kosher-style steakhouse was known for its boisterous dining room. From the beginning, when Saturday Night Live stars were known to frequent. “Sammy’s is still loudly, raucously, endlessly, embracingly Jewish, a permanent underground bar mitzvah where Gentiles can act like Jews and Jews can act like themselves,” The New York Times noted back in 2014.
I never got to go to Sammy's Roumanian. Every time I passed the place, I'd tell myself to go before it's too late. And now, we hear, it's too late and I'm kicking myself, the way I knew I would.
— Jeremiah Moss 🌹 (@jeremoss) January 2, 2021
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