For its monthly feature spotlighting great downtown businesses, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation is showing a little love for B&H Dairy. A lot of people have been demonstrating their love for the 73-year-old kosher lunch counter lately. A crowdfunding campaign launched just a few days ago has raised more than $20,000. So even though B&H has not been able to reopen in the aftermath of the 2nd Avenue disaster, they’ve gotten some much needed breathing room. Here’s an excerpt:
A decade ago, when Fawzy Abdelwahed, the owner of B&H Dairy, wanted a break from work at his crowded lunch counter, he would cross the avenue for a breather at the Stage Restaurant, an establishment with a similar cozy vintage atmosphere. A new waitress – and new immigrant from Poland – named Aleksandra “Ola” Smigielska not only took his order, but wiped his smudged eyeglasses clean. That was it: Fawzy pursued Ola, a friendship was born, and the couple was married at Brooklyn Borough Hall in 2007. Ola became co-owner of B&H, and thus a Catholic from Poland and a Muslim from Egypt became the proud standard-bearers of a kosher restaurant founded by Jews in the late 1930s.
You can read the rest of the story here.
