
There is much studying of the menu, as if it were an ancient text. With his father, Citrano is said to have coined the slogan “Take your children to the place your grandparents had ice cream.” Apparently there was no Eddie, and Citrano’s son Vito often jokes that his father must have reckoned that if he didn’t put his own name on the door, should a customer have a grievance, they wouldn’t get mad at him. But it was Citrano who made the place Eddie’s. According to the Rego-Forest Preservation Council, there has likely been a soda fountain at the address, a two-story red brick building at 105-29 Metropolitan Avenue, since at least the late 1940s, when William Witt, a German American, opened Witt’s Ice Cream Parlor there. Often described as New York’s longest surviving ice cream parlor, Eddie’s is a neighborhood institution beloved for both its frozen confections and the fact that it has remained pretty much unchanged since Giuseppe Citrano, an immigrant from Southern Italy, bought it in 1968. At Eddie’s Sweet Shop in Forest Hills, Queens, it is just as I remember it, as if seasoned with a dash of nostalgia. It tasted only of cream, bananas and sugar, and was much more luscious and profound than the sum of its parts. It’s easy enough to find banana and fudge or banana caramel ice cream at your local deli these days, but the flavor I miss from my childhood, and which is far harder to track down, is just plain banana.

In this series for T, the author Reggie Nadelson revisits New York institutions that have defined cool for decades, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
