This year, for another month anyway, they are celebrating their 30th birthday with deals on meals. This week they're advertising a falafel at their 1978 price.
Still owned by the original owner, Eva's renovated a couple of years ago, so you don't get a time-machine feeling in there. It's very contemporary. But there is a nostalgia wall covered with menus dating back to 1978 and photographs of bodybuilders like Arnold and Pumping Iron II star, Ms. Olympia Bev Francis, who is the most tremendously muscular woman you will ever see, along with a bunch of other folks greased and ripped.
Dining at Eva's means you'll share tables with hardbodied muscle heads and gamine vegetarians alike. And while they have a photo of SJP on the wall, it's from her big-haired 1980s days, and you won't find any Carrie Bradshaw wannabes here, making Eva's a safe place to enjoy a little taste of old New York.
4 comments:
Nice discovery...I've been by the place many times, but figured it was some juicehead hangout. I'll stop in next time.
Eva's is great. Fast service, friendly people, and really good fast food. Also of note and worth checking out on 8th: a great homey little Mexican place whose name I can't recall, Grey's Papaya (!), the thrift store at 8th and MacDougal, and Cachao's jazz club.
WOW this was one of the places I frequented most during the late 70's as a teenager roaming the village after school and on weekends, usually drunk or in the process of getting drunk. But haven't been inside in decades.
The reason? Two reasons. Very cheap vegetarian food. And a bathroom. When you are a girl, you learn all the bathroom spots in a neighborhood, and in the village they are sparse.
This is mostly because there are (were) no hotels, which is the default place to find a bathroom because you don't have to ask a bartender if it's ok to use it; during the daylight hours, you have to ask because the place is otherwise empty.
But I must relate my favorite Eva's memory. I was here with my boyfriend, probably around 1980, and I warned him not to eat the peppers they put out on the table, because they are HOT. He picked one up, said, "that's the coldest thing I've ever felt" and popped the whole thing in his mouth. We had to go home because he couldn't recover from the shock and the tears didn't stop draining from his eyes for hours. To this day we still joke about Eva's peppers.
The menus they incessantly hand out around NYU must be working. I could have wallpapered my apartment with those things when I was in school. I don't think I ever actually went in, though.
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