Malka’s Upper West Side patio becomes a sukkah for four nights

Every year around now, the Upper West Side stages a small civic miracle: balconies that have held nothing but a dying fern since April suddenly sprout schach, and every restaurant with a patio gets the same phone call from the same people. This year Malka has an answer.

Eyal Shani’s Upper West Side outpost at 161 West 72nd Street, between Columbus Avenue and Broadway, is putting a sukkah on its patio for four dinners of Chol Hamoed: Monday, September 28, through Thursday, October 1. Sukkot starts at sundown on Friday, September 25, so the first days of Yom Tov and the Shabbat after them are off the table, as is Hoshana Rabbah, which lands on a Friday this year.

The booking mechanics deserve a paragraph, because someone at your table will get them wrong. Reservations go through Resy and the sukkah counts as outdoor seating, so that’s what you select. Pick the dining room and you’ll have a perfectly nice dinner indoors.

For the record: Malka took over the old North Miznon space and is Shani’s first fully kosher restaurant in the U.S., following the Tel Aviv original, which opened in 2018. It’s glatt, under Rabbi Mehlman, with listings naming the agency as National Kosher Supervision. The schnitzel with mashed potatoes remains the order and the sukkah is unlikely to change that, so make sure to ask the staff for one (or three?) upon seating.

The upcoming sukkah dinners make total sense as Malka has taken the role of a small events company across both its locations for the past few years. Dumbo ran a fall dinner series built around global wines and cuisines, for example, and, in June, the Manhattan location answered with its own run of Israeli wine dinners, with tickets at $200 for the tasting-menu nights. A sukkah is a quieter production: no visiting winemaker, no ticket, just a table outside and the regular menu. It may still be the most sought-after reservation of the fall.

It also puts Malka in real company on a stretch of Manhattan that takes this seriously. A few avenues north, Talia’s Steakhouse at 668 Amsterdam Avenue is open for Chol Hamoed lunch and dinner, with a $50 deposit for sukkah seats that goes toward the check. Across town, Eighteen on East 81st Street, Le Marais on West 46th and Rothschild TLV on Lexington all offer similar meal environments as well. A determined family could eat in a different Manhattan sukkah every night of Chol Hamoed without repeating a menu. We’d advise against announcing that plan to the children, though.

As for weather, it’s an outdoor seat in the last days of September, and nobody knows yet. Remember: the holiday was designed with a draft in mind.