LIEBERMAN'S HAS SERVED BOROUGH PARK SINCE 1968 AND ITS CORNER IS LISTED AT $2.8 MILLION

On the corner of 16th Avenue and 48th Street in Borough Park, across from a Chase branch, there's a kosher luncheonette with four wooden tables that seat 12 and a counter with room for ten more. Jacob Lieberman bought it in 1968. His son Shloimie and Shloimie's wife, Roz, run it now. This summer the two-story corner building went on the market through Douglas Elliman at $2.8 million, and the couple has said that if it sells, they retire. Patch reported it on October 13, and BKReader followed three days later. No closing date has been set, and in both October reports the counter was still serving. Here's what keeping it open has taken, why the next generation isn't taking over, and what the listing is selling.

Jacob Lieberman came to the counter from groceries. He'd run grocery stores in East New York, Brownsville and Sheepshead Bay, Patch reported. The luncheonette's original owners needed a buyer because the husband had fallen ill, and a relative pushed the Liebermans to take it over. They did, in 1968, and the corner has fed people who keep kosher ever since.

Jacob's wife, Tillie, set the way the kitchen cooks, and the cook working there now still follows her method, according to Patch. Jacob died in 1990, and Shloimie kept the business the way his father left it, Boro Park 24 wrote in a 2021 profile. That piece listed what regulars come for: egg salad, tuna salad, salmon croquettes, omelets, sandwiches, baked goods and coffee brewed in pots the same way for about 50 years. The busiest day of the year, the profile said, is the day before Passover, when customers come in for the last bread and cake they'll eat before the holiday.

Shloimie has spent 55 years in the business, by Patch's count, and Roz has worked beside him for decades. We couldn't find a website, an online menu or an Instagram account for the place. It runs on the people who walk in off 16th Avenue, and it has for 58 years.

The Liebermans live on Staten Island. On a normal day they leave the house around 6 AM, stop at a kosher bakery for rolls and supplies, and drive into Borough Park, Patch reported. When the Staten Island Expressway backs up, opening slips past 8 AM. They close in the afternoon, the employees clean the dining room and the kitchen, and the couple gets home around 5 PM.

The day starts well before the drive. In 2021, Roz told Boro Park 24 that the two of them woke at four every morning so they could open at 7:30. The same profile carried a line that anyone who has run a small food business will recognize. "We have never taken a vacation in thirty years," the couple said. That was five years ago. The routine Patch described this October is the same shape: the early start, the drive, the bakery stop, the counter, the drive home.

Put the two accounts side by side and the day runs from a 4 AM alarm to a 5 PM return, about 13 hours, for a counter that seats 22 people at once. The hours a customer sees, from a stool with a coffee, are a fraction of it. The rest is the driving, the prep, the eggs and the closing, the work nobody watches.

The keyword on our post is CANDLED, and here's where it comes from. Shloimie told Patch that his father kept a lamp and held every egg in the carton up to it. That's candling, the old way of looking inside an egg without cracking it, and in a kosher kitchen the thing you're looking for is a blood spot. An egg with one doesn't get cooked.

Today the check happens on ice. The eggs sit in trays over ice until someone orders, Patch reported. Each one is inspected for blood spots before it cooks, and any egg that fails goes in the garbage. Every omelet and every egg sandwich is made to order in its own pan, one at a time. BKReader reported the same routine.

The dairy is held to a stricter standard too. The milk, cheese and butter are all Cholov Yisroel, the stricter kosher standard under which a religious supervisor watches the milk from the milking on.

That's the part a sale can't promise. Patch reported that the Liebermans can't guarantee a new operator would keep the kosher standards, the recipes or the cooking methods, and that they don't plan to try to control what happens to the space after it sells.

The Liebermans have daughters, and neither one works the counter. One manages a hotel spa in New Jersey. The other works in high-end custom jewelry, Patch reported. On whether the luncheonette stays in the family, Shloimie was plain. "I wouldn't want them to have this kind of life," he told Patch.

Patch ran that line right after the couple's schedule, and the schedule is what that life looks like. The 4 AM alarm. The drive in from Staten Island and the traffic that decides when the doors open. Every egg on the ice, checked one at a time, and every order in its own pan. Then the drive home. Thirty years without a vacation, by the couple's count in 2021. A father who has done that for 55 years looked at it and said he wouldn't want it for his children.

What comes next for the couple is smaller and closer to home. They told Patch and BKReader they want time with their grandchildren. Roz has thought about volunteering to drive people to medical appointments, and Shloimie may spend more of his day studying at his synagogue, Patch reported.

The listing tells you what a buyer gets. The building at 4801 16th Avenue went up in 1931. It's two stories, about 1,600 square feet, on a corner lot of 20 by 40 feet. The zoning is R6 with a C1-3 overlay, which means apartments above with shops allowed on the ground floor. Douglas Elliman's agents, Adam Gerber, Rick Rosa and Shahriar Zim, are asking $2.8 million, which works out to $1,750 a square foot for the building as it stands. The listing went up on July 10, according to its listing history, and no price cut shows there. One other site displaying the same listing shows $2,498,000; the brokerage feed and both October reports say $2.8 million.

The pitch is the air above the counter. The listing describes "an opportunity for an owner-user, investor, or redevelopment," with about 2,300 square feet of additional development potential, subject to zoning and approvals. Add that to what's there and the listing's own numbers come to about 3,900 square feet, almost two and a half times the building that holds the counter today. It also sells the location: a busy commercial stretch of 16th Avenue, the corner, the bank across the street, the F and D trains and the B8 and B11 buses nearby.

What the listing doesn't say is what a buyer will do with it. Nobody has announced an offer, a buyer or a plan, and the Liebermans haven't set a last day.

The listing counts the square feet under the counter and the square feet that could sit on top of it. It has no line for the 4 AM alarm, the eggs on the ice or the 58 years of people who did the work. When the Liebermans drive home to Staten Island for the last time, that part leaves with them, and it doesn't convey with the deed.

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