At Gem Spa, We All Screamed For Egg Creams

The latest casualty of Covid-19 is the venerable Gem Spa, which for roughly a century has sat at the southwest corner of 2nd Ave. and St. Marks Place in Manhattan. It’s been in financial trouble as of late, but the thought of Gem Spa closing its doors for good was almost inconceivable. For more on the history of the place, check out this fine article in Gothamist.

I’ve been going to Gem Spa for more than 30 years, since I started working at a record store around the corner when I was in college. They sold typical newsstand fare — magazines, cigarettes and tobacco, candy, various random toiletries — but their legend rested on their egg creams, which they proclaimed the best in the city. I’ve certainly never had a better one. One of the first articles for which I ever got paid (I believe my fee was $20) was about Gem Spa’s egg creams. If it still exists on the Web, I can’t find it, but here’s the text, written circa 2009, in all its glory:

The egg cream is perhaps the quintessential New York beverage. A humble yet ethereal alchemy of milk, seltzer, and chocolate or vanilla syrup, it’s lighter than a milkshake, more substantial than a soda, and as far as many New Yorkers are concerned, tastier than both.

The egg cream been so ubiquitous for the last century in Manhattan and Brooklyn that it’s easy to forget how few non-natives have had one, or even know what it is. Betray your ignorance to a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker and you’ll risk getting an earful of “Whaddaya mean ya nevah had an egg cream?!” To help avoid such a scenario, here’s an egg cream primer for the uninformed and uninitiated.

The first thing novices should know is that egg creams contain neither eggs nor cream. So why the name? Nobody’s quite sure. The frothy drink’s origins are also a bit of a mystery; the widely accepted story is that it was invented by Louis Auster, a Jewish immigrant who owned a Brooklyn candy store, around the turn of the 20th century. The egg cream soon migrated to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where much of the city’s Jewish population resided, and became a staple of every candy store and soda fountain in the area.

Given New York’s history as an ethnic melting pot, it’s small wonder that today, the city’s best egg cream is made by gentlemen of Indian descent. Gem Spa, at the corner of St. Marks Place and 2nd Ave., is a newsstand and candy store that’s been in business since the 1910s, when the area now known as the East Village was the heart of the then- thriving Yiddish theater district. Owned by a Jewish family for decades, the current owners thankfully kept the small soda fountain located at the counter. The Gem Spa crew mixes dozens of egg creams every day (and night — it’s open 24 hours a day) while simultaneously bantering with regulars, selling newspapers and lottery tickets, checking the IDs of prospective cigarette buyers, and all the other jobs that come with running a busy corner store.

Here’s the Gem Spa secret to making the perfect egg cream (based on many years of observation by the author):

In a 12-ounce glass, pour about an inch of whole milk (not skim). Give three or four healthy squirts of chocolate or vanilla syrup (for a more authentic New York egg cream, use Fox’s U-Bet syrups). Fill to about an inch of the top with seltzer (not club soda or mineral water or anything fancy, just plain old seltzer). Stir vigorously until the syrup, milk and seltzer have blended harmoniously. Top off with more seltzer. To get the true egg cream experience, don’t use a straw – it really does taste better without. You’ll wear your egg cream mustache proudly.