It's Time to Get Addicted to S'Mac

Although students dread declaring their majors, restaurants around Manhattan have had no problem doing the same. In the past few years, a number of specialty restaurants have opened with menus featuring variations on one basic dish.

S’Mac, a restaurant in the East Village, serves more than 10 varieties of macaroni and cheese, ranging from four-cheese to buffalo chicken. Owner Sarita Ekya came up with the idea of a mac-and-cheese restaurant while sitting in one of the original specialty restaurants, Peanut Butter & Co.

“We couldn’t shake the idea,” she said. Nine months later, in June 2006, she and her husband opened up New York’s first macaroni-and-cheese restaurant. But isn’t it risky to open a restaurant that serves just one thing?

“It makes sense to me,” said Nance Greenspan, who opened up her own specialty restaurant, Burgers & Cupcakes, in January 2007. “I would go to a steakhouse for good steak, to a pizza place for pizza.” She hoped that Burgers & Cupcakes could be the place where “people would come for the best burger they could possibly have and the best cupcake ever.”

Despite Greenspan’s confidence in Burgers & Cupcakes, it closed at the end of this summer. Comments on a BlogChelsea post about the restaurant’s closing showed mixed opinions. “Their cupcakes sucked. ... You’d think a place would do a better job producing its namesake item,” one blogger wrote. Another mourned the loss saying, “I’ll find it quite sad to live without those burgers and cupcakes.” Greenspan claims the closing was “strictly financial,” not “due to a bad concept.”

Even Greenspan admits that when it comes to specialty restaurants, the “concept is successful but difficult to pull off.” Peanut Butter & Co. is in its ninth year of business, and S’Mac is still surrounded by buzz—the East Village address above the front door is a huge part of the equation. Greenspan is currently in the process of franchising her restaurant concept, and she knows she has to be “smart about location” and “fit into the budget of the neighborhood.”

Peanut Butter & Co. and S’Mac’s locations in the Village expose them to a diverse mix of people. When asked to describe her average costumer, Ekya said, “There’s no average demographic.” She serves “people from six months old to 102 years old ... tons of families and tons of students.”

“It’s college students who really resonate with mac and cheese because [that’s what] they grew up on,” Ekya said. The nostalgia factor is a unique draw for college students and the public in general. “It’s food that definitely evokes emotion because it’s so comforting,” Ekya said. Peanut Butter & Co.’s Web site advertises that its peanut butter sandwiches even come with: “a side of Cape Cod potato chips and carrot sticks. Just like Mom used to make!”

The buzz around these restaurants and their chefs is growing. David Chang of Momofuku Noodle Bar, an Asian noodle restaurant, was recently named Rising Star Chef of the Year by the James Beard Foundation—one of the most prestigious awards in the food industry. Since then, he has opened Momofuku Ssäm Bar, another specialty restaurant concentrating on ssäm, a Korean dish similar to a burrito.

Columbia students react to the idea of specialty restaurants in a number of ways—some find it boring, while others maintain that it’s quirky and fun. “They offer the chance for some real creativity,” Diana Greenwald, CC ’11, said. “But I think the specialized stuff is, in the end, really more a tasty gimmick than anything.”