Since the Upper East Side outpost of appetizing spot Russ & Daughters Cafe closed during the pandemic, visitors to the Jewish Museum who were feeling peckish had no option for purchasing food on-site.
Until now.
Following a “soft launch” last week, a new restaurant is set to open Thursday from Chef David Teyf, called Lox at the Jewish Museum. The menu at the kosher cafe, which specializes in the Ashkenazi-style cured salmon, will be similar to that of Teyf’s other Lox restaurant, which has been operating at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City since 2016.
“We’re super excited to be uptown, like in ‘The Jeffersons’ song, ‘We’re moving on up to the East Side,’” Teyf said.
The lower-level space at the Jewish Museum, which is located in a former mansion at the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 92nd Street on the Upper East Side, has been vacant since the pandemic shuttered restaurants across the city and the country in 2020. The iconic Lower East Side spot Russ & Daughters had been operating the only kosher outpost of its popular sit-down restaurant there since 2016. The space remained closed even after pandemic restrictions were lifted, and in the spring of 2022, the museum announced the cafe had permanently closed.
According to the director of the Jewish Museum, James Snyder, opening Lox at the Jewish Museum is part of a revisioning of the cultural institution that began when he assumed his role just weeks after Oct. 7, 2023.
“Museums can and needed to continue to be places of composure and contemplation, and needed to provide respite from the challenges of the world outside,” Snyder, the former longtime director of the Israel Museum, said of his thought process at the time. “So getting food back here was something very important.”
Like at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Lox at the Jewish Museum specializes in appetizing and its signature dish is “Lox Five Ways,” a sampler platter of five different types of cured salmon: the signature house dill lox; a grapefruit and gin lox, inspired by Teyf’s favorite cocktail, a gin and tonic; a pastrami-style lox’ double-smoked lox and a Japanese-inflected sake ginger lox. The platter, which ranges from $89 for two people and $120 for four people, comes with cream cheeses and all the fixings, as well as a basket of bagels and breads.
Other items on the Eastern European-inspired menu include borscht ($18) served hot or cold with sour cream; a “Lower East Side” sandwich ($25) with pastrami lox, Russian dressing, pickled slaw, deli mustard, and onions on toasted rye bread; and a vegan carrot lox sandwich on a bagel ($18).
“As new, creative and innovative as things are [on the menu], I’m very much into tradition and Old World and keeping things the way my grandparents made them,” Teyf said. “Certain things are very old-school, in the right sense.”
Chef David Teyf is opening a new restaurant in the Upper East Side’s Jewish Museum. (Courtesy)
Teyf had briefly operated a more casual, takeout-oriented version of Lox at the Jewish Museum prior to Russ & Daughters taking over the space in 2016.
These days, Teyf — who was born in Minsk, Belarus, and came to the United States in 1979 when he was 5 — splits his time between Manhattan, Brooklyn and Greenwich, Connecticut. In addition to his two Lox restaurants, he operates an events and kosher catering company, Madison & Park, as well as two kosher delicatessens in Greenwich and Lower Manhattan called Greenwich & Delancey. Teyf is also the executive chef at the 2nd Floor Bar & Essen, a cocktail lounge above the Upper East Side location of the 2nd Avenue Deli.
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Having a food operator with catering experience was a key consideration for Snyder’s updated vision for the Jewish Museum. In addition to reimagining the museum’s third and fourth floors — a renovation project that is currently underway and is expected to be completed in October 2025 — Snyder was seeking an additional space inside the museum “for more intimate events that could also be for catering.”
“The focus started to be on getting someone who could do a kind of [sit-down restaurant] service, the same way that Russ & Daughters did,” Snyder said, “but also really take advantage of the rest of the museum.”
With the renovation and Teyf’s catering experience, Snyder hopes to create “a beautiful space that at nighttime could be used for entertaining, overlooking the reservoir, looking down Fifth Avenue.” (Snyder also aims to “rethink the narrative of the collection [3rd] floor and engage the education [4th] floor in a way that’s part of the public experience of being in the museum.”)
Back in Belarus, Teyf’s grandparents ran a matzah factory — and in their honor, Teyf serves his customers and catering clients what he calls a “matzah babka bite.” Unlike the sweet pastries that New Yorkers think of as babka, Teyf’s babka is savory and oniony, and more akin to a kugel.
But at his Lox restaurants, fish takes pride of place. “I happen to love lox, I happen to love curing fish,” Teyf said, adding that lox and bagels have, of course, become a New York City culinary staple. “It’s one of my passions.”
“All our fish comes in from Scotland,” he added. “I hand-pick all the fish, and it’s all cured and smoked in-house.”
The partnership between the museum and Teyf happened “very quickly,” said Snyder — the museum reached out to the chef and restaurateur just before Rosh Hashanah and the restaurant’s soft opening happened about a month later — and not a moment too soon.
“People were all very sweet, but it’s like the first thing they would say to me and to Tina, my wife, was, ‘When is he going to reopen Russ & Daughters or get somebody else in there?’” Snyder quipped.
“When I told Tina that we were bringing David Teyf, she said, ‘Thank God, they’ll stop asking,’” he said.
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