There is a specific New York ritual that involves standing outside a small restaurant in SoHo at half past eleven on a Sunday for ninety minutes in order to eat eggs. Jack's Wife Freda is one of the restaurants that ritual is performed outside of, and the strange thing about it is that the whole exercise is unnecessary. The full menu runs all day at all five locations, from 8:30 in the morning until nine or later at night.
The whole menu runs from half past eight in the morning to closing, which means the two-hour weekend queue is a choice rather than a requirement. Ask Karpo which branch is quiet right now.
The all-day menu is the point
Every branch opens at 8:30am. Monday through Thursday they run to 10pm, Friday and Saturday to 11pm, and Sunday to 9pm. The same menu is served throughout — there is no switch from a brunch card to a dinner card at three o'clock.
That means the dish you are queueing for at noon on Saturday is available at four in the afternoon with no wait, and at half past eight in the morning with no wait, and at nine at night with a glass of wine.
This is the single most useful thing to know about the restaurant and it is buried under a decade of brunch coverage. If your reason for going is the food rather than the specific social experience of a New York weekend queue, go on a Tuesday at four.
Five locations, and which to choose
The original is at 226 Lafayette Street in SoHo and it is the smallest and the busiest. West Village at 50 Carmine Street, Chelsea at 116 Eighth Avenue and Union Square at 72 University Place spread the load across Manhattan, and there is a Williamsburg room at 258 Wythe Avenue.
The newer and larger rooms are consistently easier than Lafayette Street. If you want the original for its own sake, go early on a weekday; if you want to eat without planning, go to Union Square or Chelsea.
Williamsburg is the outlier and the most pleasant on a warm day, because Brooklyn's version of this restaurant sits in a neighbourhood where you can walk afterwards rather than being folded straight back into SoHo shopping traffic.
What the food actually is
The menu is a specific and unusual mix: Israeli and South African cooking, filtered through New York Jewish food. That combination came from the founders' own backgrounds and it is why the menu does not read like any other all-day café in the city.
In practice that means shakshuka and grilled halloumi sitting alongside peri-peri chicken and a rosewater waffle, all on the same page. It sounds incoherent written down and it is not, because the through-line is bright, herbaceous, acidic cooking rather than a cuisine.
The green shakshuka is the dish to order if you order one thing, and the rosewater waffle is the one everybody photographs. The peri-peri chicken is the reason to come at dinner rather than at breakfast, and it is the part of the menu most people never try.
Portions are moderate rather than American-large, which is worth knowing if you are arriving hungry. Two dishes between two people is a light meal here, not an overordering.
It is worth understanding why the queue exists at all, because it is not a capacity failure. The rooms are small by design and the restaurant does not take reservations for small parties at peak times, which means the wait is the allocation mechanism. Nobody is being held back; there is simply no other way to distribute forty seats on a Sunday.
The corollary is that the wait is almost entirely a function of when you arrive rather than of how popular the restaurant is. Two people at 8:45am on a Saturday will walk straight in at any branch. The same two people at 12:15pm will wait an hour at Lafayette Street.
If you must go at peak time, put your name down and use the wait. SoHo, the West Village and Union Square all have somewhere worth spending forty minutes within two blocks, and the restaurant will text you.
Coffee, drinks and the timing
There is a proper coffee programme rather than a diner urn, which is part of why the morning hours are worth using. Eight-thirty to ten in the morning is genuinely quiet in every branch and it is the best hour of the day in the SoHo room.
There is also a full drinks list, and the fact that the same shakshuka is available at nine at night with a glass of wine in front of it is one of the more useful facts about eating in Manhattan. It is an excellent solo dinner.
The mid-afternoon, roughly three to five, is the emptiest window of all and the one nobody uses. If you have flexibility, that is the answer.
Practical notes
Jack's Wife Freda has five locations: 226 Lafayette Street in SoHo, 50 Carmine Street in the West Village, 116 Eighth Avenue in Chelsea, 72 University Place near Union Square, and 258 Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg. All open at 8:30am and run to 10pm Monday to Thursday, 11pm Friday and Saturday, and 9pm on Sunday. The full menu is served all day at every branch. The cooking mixes Israeli and South African influences with New York Jewish food; order the green shakshuka, the rosewater waffle or the peri-peri chicken. Lafayette Street is the smallest and busiest — go to Union Square or Chelsea to avoid the wait, or go at 8:30am or between three and five.
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Ask Karpo first
Five branches all serving the same all-day menu means the only real question is which one is not queueing right now. Ask Karpo which Jack's Wife Freda is closest and quietest at this hour, and whether it is worth walking a few extra blocks to a bigger room.
