Tosca Cafe

food drink

Tosca Cafe occupies a corner building on Columbus Avenue with red leather booths and a ceiling pressed with tin plates. Since nineteen nineteen, it has served as a meeting place for poets, opera singers, and detectives. When the original owner, Agostino Pandola, died, his widow handled the finances, but she kept a shotgun behind the bar to settle disputes. The cafe survived Prohibition by serving coffee spiked with brandy, and the machine that steams that drink still works today.

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