Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Food

Frances Edelstein, Holocaust Survivor And ‘Polish Tea Room’ Owner, Dies At 92

She was a Holocaust survivor who shared fed Broadway’s elite – and Times Square characters — at a heimish eatery so beloved it inspired a Neil Simon play.

Frances Edelstein, who ran Cafe Edison with her husband, Harry, for 30 years, died in New Jersey this week at 92.

The couple had run lunch counters in Brooklyn when a friend who owned Midtown’s Edison Hotel asked them to take over his restaurant. Relaunching Cafe Edison in 1980, the Edelsteins “turned it into a bastion of matzo brei, borscht and corned beef, served in generous portions,” according to The New York Times. “It makes me happy when I think of all the gentiles we made Jewish,” Frances Edelstein told the Times in 2001.

That same year, Neil Simon’s “45 Seconds to Broadway,” opened in New York, set in a restaurant he called the Polish Cafe; it was a loving tribute to the Edelsteins and their eatery. Cafe Edison earned the nickname “The Polish Tearoom” from regulars; it was a sly spin on New York’s “Russian Tea Room,” a gilded midtown hangout. Until its closing in 2014, Cafe Edison became a favored hangout for Broadway actors, directors, and theater hangers-on, along with hordes of tourists. The Edelsteins even earned an honorary Tony award in 2004.

Frances Edelstein was born Frima Trost in Poland in 1926. Except for one brother, her entire family died in the Holocaust. Her husband’s family was also murdered by the Nazis in Poland. The couple married in Warsaw, and arrived in the US in 1947.

It was recipes she remembered from her own mother that inspired Frances Edelstein’s cooking. “If my grandchildren wanted kreplach — which aren’t easy to make — she’d have 100 of them the next day,” Frances Edelstein’s daughter, Harriet Strohl, told The New York Times. “They’d say, ‘Oh, bubbe, we haven’t had stuffed cabbage in a long time’ — she’d make 30 of them.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.