Kibbitz & Nosh

Marcia Bricker Halperin’s Kibbitz & Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria is more than a portrait of a place — it’s a love letter to a Brooklyn that once was, and to the people who made it hum. Shot in the mid-1970s at Dubrow’s Cafeteria on Kings Highway, it’s a reminder that the best street photography doesn’t always happen on the street. Sometimes it’s found indoors, where the coffee is hot, the conversations louder, and gestures say more than words ever could.

I actually ate at Dubrow’s a few times as a kid with my mother, so the book hit a personal chord. I remember the look of the place vividly — the grand mirrored walls, the enormous mural, the cafeteria trays stamped with that unmistakable Dubrow’s script. And of course, the portions were as oversized as the personalities. For a kid, it felt like stepping into a Broadway set designed by a deli counterman, but there was no mistaking it for what it really was: a community center disguised as a cafeteria.

Halperin clearly felt that same sense of theater. “I found myself as if on a stage,” she’s said, “looking out at a tableau of memorable Brooklyn faces.” And what faces they are — men in fedoras hunched over coffee, women in leopard-print coats, old friends gossiping, couples bickering. It’s as if time itself sat down at Dubrow’s for a sandwich and never left.

There’s an unmistakable tenderness to these photographs. Halperin isn’t a voyeuristic outsider, sneaking photos from the corner of the room; she’s a participant, a fellow diner. “I would talk to people I’d never otherwise meet,” she writes — cab drivers, ex-vaudevillians, Holocaust survivors, prizefighters, bookies. That human connection is visible in every frame. The result is what street photography does best when it’s done right: it elevates the ordinary.

The offbeat, quirky characters remind me of the work of my favorite street photographer, Vivian Maier. But Halperin’s approach also has something of Robert Frank’s spirit — empathetic, never mocking. She sees her subjects as they are, without irony or judgment. Many of the photos made me smile, but the humor comes from life itself, not from the photographer’s stance.

As someone who hits the New York streets with my camera almost daily, what really struck me about these photos was the feeling of community they convey. This is what the world once looked like when people lingered over coffee and a newspaper instead of scrolling through their phones. It captures a part of New York that has largely vanished — the communal spaces that once defined city life: the diners, cafeterias, and luncheonettes where the counterman and cashier knew who you were, where people came to talk, schmooze, and kibbitz, and nobody needed Wi-Fi.

Dubrow’s is long gone, and New York has such a strong sense of the present that the past often just gets obliterated. Halperin’s book resurrects it with warmth and wit. In her photographs, the cafeteria becomes a microcosm of Brooklyn — messy, loud, funny, compassionate. It’s the kind of place, and the kind of photography, that induces in me a strange kind of homesickness — making me miss what I never fully appreciated at the time.

Street photography at its best doesn’t chase spectacle. It finds meaning in the familiar, beauty in the ordinary. Kibbitz & Nosh is exactly that — a celebration of the everyday, served with love, a side of nostalgia, and a generous helping of humanity.