Type "Rascal House" into Google and you can almost smell the pastrami. Nearly two decades after the doors closed, thousands of people still search for it every month. Nobody searches for an ordinary restaurant eighteen years later. They search for the places that meant something.
The deli at 172nd and Collins
Wolfie Cohen opened the Rascal House on Collins Avenue in Sunny Isles Beach in May 1954, under a neon sign you could read from halfway down the block. The building was pure Miami Modern, and the room fed everyone: locals, celebrities, and above all the vacationing New Yorkers (and, every winter, half of Montreal) who lined up out the door for a taste of home.
What made it special
The line moved fast because the kitchen did. Before you ordered, the table was already full: baskets of miniature rolls and danishes, steel buckets of half-sour pickles and sauerkraut, all of it free, all of it refilled without asking. The portions were enormous, the waitresses had seen everything, and the cheesecake was famous enough that airlines served it on flights between Miami and New York.
The end of an era
Wolfie Cohen died in 1986, and the Rascal House carried on for another two decades before serving its last sandwich on March 30, 2008, after 54 years. The building is gone now. The memories, judging by the search bar, are not.
Painting the places we can't go back to
I paint the restaurants people can't stop missing. The Rascal House painting is one of my favourites: the neon, the sign, the whole promise of that room, in bright mixed-media pop art. It hangs in kitchens and Florida rooms for the same reason people still google the original. Some tables you don't forget.
š Shop the Wolfie Cohen's Rascal House print ā (three sizes, from $75)
More restaurant nostalgia: the 6 most iconic NYC restaurants and Montreal's 6 most iconic tables, both reimagined as pop art coasters.