the year 2015

from covenger + kester:

Ripe for Revival? Pictured above, in all its “Bauhaus-meets-butcher-shop” glory, is Zum Zum—the Atomic Era sausage eatery once located in the main lobby of the swanky Pan Am Building at 200 Park Avenue in Manhattan.

This wasn’t the only Zum Zum location; founder Kurt Widmer, a “master Swiss-born sausagemaker,” established a dozen or so other shops around town (on Broadway across from the Wintergarden Theater; on University Place near NYU) and elsewhere across the country (including Harvard Square). But it was definitely the coolest, quickly becoming, as the author of Take Ivy has noted (in Japanese) “the restaurant where Madison Avenue boys have a glass at lunchtime.”

Given that the menu consisted of bratwurst with sauteed onions on a caraway roll, various sausages with choice of mustard (Das Hot, Das Sweet), wienerbrod, warm potato salad, heavy on the vinegar, and large steins of imported German beer drawn from wall-mounted kegs, we would’ve been right there alongside them. Sadly, Zum Zum vanished sometime in the late 1980s (or earlier).