By Gus Saltonstall

Change is attempting to come to the ever-present weekend line outside of the popular Hungarian Pastry Shop bakery in Morningside Heights.

“The line on Saturday in front of the Hungarian Pastry shop was coming from the south, normally it is from the north,” Sean Curran, a reader, emailed West Side Rag over the weekend. “Was this influenced by what happened at Absolute Bagels? Is it a sign of a reversal of all line directions on the UWS?”

Curran’s mention of Absolute Bagels, near West 107th Street, referred to the Rag’s April 16 story about the line-direction change at the popular bagel spot over the last month, following the closure of the Garden of Eden market next door.

The question of why the Hungarian Pastry Shop’s line also changed direction this past weekend on Amsterdam Avenue near the corner of West 111th Street had no immediate answer. One wondered if there was some sort of outside force influencing local lines? Was it a strange call and response to the nearby Absolute Bagels line shift? Or was another factor at play?

One thing is certain: Curran was correct in his statement that the Hungarian Pastry Shop’s line generally forms on the north side of the store.

Here is an Instagram post from the bakery in November of 2022 that also shows the line formulating on the uptown side of the shop.

It turns out, management at the Hungarian Pastry Shop has actually been trying to change the direction of its line — and it is all in the name of being a good neighbor.

“I’m very surprised people paid attention to this and noticed the line change,” a woman who works at the counter of the Morningside Heights bakery said, laughing. She declined to give her name.

“The boss recently said we need to put more of an effort into telling customers to line up on the left side of the shop,” she said. “When you stand on the left side of the store, it is mostly [in front of] our place. If people line up there, they are not blocking somebody else’s [storefront]. We don’t want to stop customers of the other business from being able to go through because of our line,” she explained. “So, it is just being a good neighbor and trying to manage it in a better way.”

The “other business” is the Italian restaurant Tartina, which sits just north of the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and does get its entrance blocked when the bakery’s line forms on its uptown side.

The Hungarian Pastry Shop has served customers at its Morningside Heights storefront since 1961, but it was not until the COVID-19 pandemic that the business began getting a consistent weekend line. Employees have tried to tell customers to line up on the south side, but with the constant rush of people and not wanting to yell from inside the shop, it can be challenging to direct patrons to the other side once they have already lined up.

“Somehow, since the pandemic, people started lining up on the right side, so it’s just the way it happened,” the counterwoman told the Rag. “But, nobody knew at the time that we were going to have a line all the time.”

“The boss has tried to come up with different ideas,” she added, “like putting a little banner on the sidewalk to tell [people] the direction of the line. This has actually been in discussion for a while, to make sure we don’t block the neighbor’s restaurant, and, again, to make sure we’re being a good neighbor.”

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