Remembering the Red Apple, an Iconic Roadside Restaurant in the Catskills

The Red Apple Rest opened in 1931, in Southfields, N.Y., and quickly became a place where people stopped to fill up their cars and their stomachs on the way to the hotels and bungalow colonies in the Catskills. It survived economic downturns, competing businesses, and the new highways that lured drivers away. By the time the restaurant closed its doors in 1984, it had become a legend for generations of diners. In her new memoir, Elaine Freed Lindenblatt, daughter of Big Apple’s founder Reuben Freed, shares her memories of the restaurant’s rise and fall.

By 1955, after nearly a quarter-century of operation, the restaurant had developed into an over a million-customer-a-year motorists’ mecca. It served perhaps twenty thousand people on a Sunday in peak season. During the weeks that the bungalows opened and New York City schools dismissed for the summer, one could barely get inside the door, let alone reach the counter to order or find a seat.

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From Tablet Magazine