Pocketbook.: The Big Apple Meets the Big Easy

Manhattan Restaurant Preserves Cajun Cuisine, Vinyl Jukebox

By Hannah Vanbiber (hvanbiber@gmail.com)

Great Jones Cafe features Cajun cuisine and
down-home cooking in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Mark Hitzges, Co-Owner and Chef. Photo by Hannah Vanbiber

MANHATTAN—What could capture the spirit of New Orleans better than a little Cajun food and a little New Orleans jazz? Nothing; and that’s exactly what Great Jones Café has been providing for almost 30 years. With southern cuisine and the only vinyl jukebox left in Manhattan, Great Jones Café is a stop well worth taking.

Located on Great Jones Street in the ritzy Manhattan district known as “the Bowery,” the restaurant is little more than a handful of tables and a bar. Even at 3:30 pm, usually a drag time for restaurants, almost every table has occupants. The chef is talking to customers from a window in the kitchen.

“It’s a family-run place in all senses but blood,” said co-owner and chef Mark Hitzges. “The people who work here have worked here forever.”

The Jones Jukebox is over 80 years old.
Photo by Hannah Vanbiber

With the door thrown open, passersby can hear faint strains from the 80-year-old jukebox, which was listed by Time Out as one of the top 100 things to see in New York City. Allegedly the only surviving vinyl jukebox in Manhattan, the Jones Jukebox is a rare classic, hailing from the time when jukeboxes were a major player in the success of recording artists like Bing Crosby.

Though originally a Cajun restaurant, the menu now includes an array of dishes with southern, Creole, and even foreign inspiration.

“We have a huge amount of Swedish people who love to come here,” Hitzges said. “I found out that they actually cook crawfish in Sweden!”

For Hitzges, cooking is a magical way of exploring and combining the flavors of various cultures and places.

"Customers come here for drinks
on a first date and then twenty years later
they bring their kids," said Mark Hitzges,
Co-Owner and Chef. Photo by Hannah Vanbiber

“I remember at my first job as a restaurant dishwasher,” he recalled. “The chef made this dish with shrimp, butter, salt, and pepper. When I tasted the dish, I literally teared up. I still wish I could cook that well.”

When the café was first opened in 1983, Great Jones Street was a “desolate, forgotten block.”

“At night you’d look out and see a crack deal going on,” Hitzges said. Now J. Crew has a Bowery line and the cheapest rooms at the Bowery Hotel run upwards of $350 a night.

But Great Jones has hardly changed at all.

“People will come here after leaving for twenty years and say, ‘This place is exactly the same!’” Hitzges said.