Newest Lunch’s name may be dated, but food, service stand test of time
Schenectady eatery known for its hot dogs and loyal clientele hits century mark
The coronavirus pandemic wasn’t the first time a famed Electric City lunch spot forced its patrons to social distance.
Doris Ward recalled when Newest Lunch stationed a police officer at the doors to control the late-night crowds famished after barhopping.
“Only so many could get in and out,” Ward said.
That was sometime back in the 1940s. Doris turned 100 this year.
So did Newest Lunch.
And while Doris has a birthdate — Jan. 10 — the precise origins of the iconic eatery have largely faded into history.
Owner George Plakas has sought the help of historians but hasn’t come up with a definite opening date, just 1921 (although he said the building at the foot of Hamilton Hill itself dates back to at least 1894).
But the location on Albany Street at the corner of Germania Avenue has been a constant. So has the Greek background of the families who have owned and run it in an uninterrupted stream, selling hot dogs to the working-class masses streaming in from the factories that lit and hauled the world.
Bookended by pandemics, perhaps no
other venue in the city brings such a dynamic cross-section of the city’s denizens together.
It’s a place where drug dealers rub elbows with court judges, cops and retirees — sometimes literally in the narrow confines — and no questions are asked.
“It’s Switzerland,” said William Rivas, a community activist. “You grew up with the people here like you grew up with the people in the community. Even if you were not living your best life, police officers were here and there were no issues here.”
The venue’s status as a Schenectady staple is not by accident, Plakas said.
“You have the dealer at one booth and the police chief in the next,” Plakas said. “We’re neutral. You leave yourself at the door, and everybody is treated the exact same way. The regulars police it themselves. You do whatever you do, but you don’t mess around at Newest Lunch.”
While breakfast business has soared in the past year, the restaurant’s signature dish remains the hot dog with its own unique lingo.
Ordering “the works” will get you a hot dog layered with mustard, meat sauce and onions — in that order.
The meat sauce, Plakas said, is the single staple of his business.
“The hot dogs and meat sauce is why we’ve been here for 100 years,” Plakas said. “It’s tangy, but not spicy. For meat sauce, it’s light and not so heavy it sits like lead.”
Workers prepare them in the front window and deposit orders to patrons lining the counter, replete with plastic baskets containing silverware, napkins and ketchup and hot sauce in plastic squirt bottles.
Restaurants catering to General Electric and American Locomotive lunch crowds flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, all of them with their own unique recipes.
Some have been lost to history, including Ruby’s Silver Diner on Erie Boulevard, which was torn down in 2007.
Survivors include Broadway Lunch, Mike’s Hot Dog’s, Morettes King Steakhouse and Redwood Diner just over the Rotterdam town line on Hamburg Street.
Robert Mcdonald, 65, contemplated the nuances of each as he bent a slice of toast in half at the counter.
“Different tastes for different people,” Mcdonald said. “This is my preference. All-around good.”
Mcdonald, a retired construction worker, has been coming to Newest Lunch at least once a week for over 50 years, ever since he tagged along with his father on errands.
Sometimes he likes the meat sauce placed on top of the onions, where it runs through to the bottom of the bun. Workers will do it that way — if you ask them.
Mcdonald pondered the complexities as the restaurant whirred to life during a lunch rush.
Employees unplugged the phone because they couldn’t keep up with the deluge of calls.
But the front door chimed an uninterrupted melody:
Ding, ding, ding. Another order, another group squeezed into one of seven booths or along the lunch counter, several of them roped off with yellow tape due to social distancing requirements.
A city cop. A squad from Mohawk Ambulance. City grounds crews. A sitting state Supreme Court judge, who ambled over from the nearby courthouse and settled into a booth, sans robe.
Regular people.
Plakas, 46, has worked at the business on and off since 1993. Originally from Long Island, he moved to the city to be closer to his uncle, John Papanikos, the longtime former owner who purchased the venue in the late 1980s.
Papanikos himself purchased the business from his former boss.
“Unfortunately, the history before that is very choppy,” Plakas said.
Plakas, a mechanical engineer by training, was tasked with running the now-shuttered Newest Pizza next door as well as a satellite operation in Rotterdam. He bounced around between different jobs — including General Electric — before returning to work full-time, assuming ownership following the death of Papanikos last May.
He likes the idea of running his own turf.
“I’ve done the professional route and I feel like I’m not built that way,” Plakas said.
Service has always been paramount.
Customers recalled an intricate web of connections between generations of staff and their own families.
It’s a home away from home, with walls lined with hundreds of photos of customers and staff.
There are folks like Angelo Papanikos, who would venture outside to greet Nick Viall’s father when he was unwell and couldn’t leave the car.
Papanikos also delivered stern words to a young Justin Chaires, who found himself in trouble after pedaling his bicycle across town from his Goose Hill home to grab a bite as a hungry youngster.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Papanikos told Chaires, now 30. “Just call me.”
Chaires did, becoming Newest Lunch’s first delivery customer years before the restaurant formally launched the service.
Plakas is a self-described jack of all trades, manning the grill, preparing takeout items and running orders.
A lot of the work is thankless, he acknowledged, and sometimes he pines to be up front, greeting customers, assembling hot dogs and swapping the latest stories from the neighborhood.
“It really is a friendship, a family thing — it’s a connection,” Plakas said.
When the staff turned the phone back on, it rang continuously. The wait time for orders was 45 minutes.
The cycle repeated itself several days later, where the venue quivered with frenetic energy on a brisk springtime afternoon.
Ward, the centenarian, chatted with staffers as her brother, Bob Hallenbeck, recalled how staffers would line up hot dog buns on their arms and go down the row, adding dogs, slathering them with mustard and doling them out to customers.
And again and again, patrons struck upon the same reasons why they keep coming back:
A sense of family. Good sauce. And consistency.
“It’s more meatier. It’s not spicy — it’s all-around sauce,” said Rick Rorick, who has been a regular since he wandered in for his lunch break from grand jury duty 18 years ago.
In many ways, consistency is baked into the place's DNA: Plakas estimates Newest Lunch has used White Eagle Packing Company's hot dogs for at least 30 years, a recipe that itself hasn’t changed in 95 years.
And while Newest Lunch has tinkered with additions over the years, hot dogs remain their bread and butter.
Historically, the business was fueled by a stream of shift workers pouring out of General Electric, using arteries like the “Subway” — a tunnel network underneath the railway bridge — to ferry them throughout the city, including Broadway, Bellevue and Mont Pleasant.
To get to Hamilton Hill, workers used the Klondike Ramp, the remnants which are still visible at the Broadway exit of Interstate 890.
“From a broader standpoint, a lot of these places came about in the 1920s and 1930s as a result of the growing workforce at GE and the other businesses downtown, and they needed a place to eat their lunch,” said Chris Hunter, vice president of collections and exhibitions at Schenectady's Museum of Innovation and Science.
Mcdonald recalled Albany Street as a thriving corridor lined with bars.
“You couldn’t walk from Veeder Avenue to Michigan Avenue and have one beer at each place,” Mcdonald said. “They’d have to carry you home.”
The downsizing of the workforce and shifts in eating habits shuttered many city businesses.
The construction of I-890 also led to commuters bypassing downtown entirely.
Newest Lunch is a survivor. But the onset of the pandemic last March nearly spelled doom for the business.
“We were losing money every day we were staying open,” Plakas said.
Plakas gathered his staff and told him he would apply for federal aid relief. But if they were going to keep the doors open, everyone needed to climb onboard.
“It was agreed upon and everybody was going to work,” Plakas said. “Either we do this all, or we don’t do it.”
Winter was bad too. Only recently has business rebounded. And while the phone ringing constantly is a good thing, the cramped confines mean Plakas can’t move as much volume as he wants.
Everything is made to order, including soups, which means Newest Lunch can’t simply defrost items from the freezer before serving them, a measure which would free up critical kitchen real estate.
Plakas is toying with the idea of expanding the kitchen into the former Newest Pizza space next door, a move that would double preparation space and allow him to ramp up capacity, but remains undecided. He works six days a week, often for 12 hours.
“I’ve got five young kids I’d like to see grow up,” Plakas said.
The modest two-story building itself is a holdout in an outpost of change. Over time, the two-family houses that once filled the neighborhood have been ripped down, with other developments going up in their place.
Newest Lunch sits in the shadows of one housing project, Summit Towers, and another apartment complex is rising nearby
Plakas is unsure what to make of the development, but hopes it’ll help his business, and help usher in another 100 years of prosperity — and consistency.