Izzy & Nat’s

Really sad to see the diner has closed and its now a Pick A Bagel. You were always buzzing and were an awesome addition to our neighborhood. Hope all is well.

Thank you UnilocalERS for helping us find this little hidden gem. Based upon the reviews, we were ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ but wanted a good breakfast knowing what the days itenary was. The service was great, the wait staff friendly, and food was just like my momma’s! I had the Izzy omelet with carmelized onions, spinach and roasted mushrooms. It melted in my mouth and I ate every bit. I could have split it with someone but did no t so needless to say, I walked out completely stuffed. This is a good olé home cooking kind of place.
My friend who lives nearby had never heard of it so glad we could find a place for them to go for a great breakfast when they are missing the midwest.

Went here for lunch based off of my dad’s choice. It’s a nice, small, deli in Battery Park city just minutes from the World Financial Center, ⁹⁄₁₁ Memorial, and Battery Park.
I ordered chicken salad on a kaiser roll, and my dad got pastrami. My sandwich was absolutely ginormous. It was huge, probably 6 inches tall, wow! The chicken salad tasted fresh, and the roll was very good as well. Dad’s pastrami was good as well.
The service was phenomenal. Our waitress was pleasant and funny, and just a picturesque New Yorker. Seems like this was out of the norm based on the other negative reviews – but I had no problems.
To go bagels were excellent. I’d stop by for a quick lunch again!

Excellent pastrami sandwich, homemade chicken noodle soup.

The neighborhood place that could have been. I live in Battery Park City, so I will eat at any grubby little flea shack that exists because the hood isn’t exactly a paradise of choices. I also dole out liberal marriage proposals to all women who love bagels and smoked fish as much as I do (i’m easy). This place and me could have had a long loving relationship, if they could get anything right… ever. Outside of the fact that the food (other than the actual bagel itself) is bleh, the prices keep getting more and more outlandish. If the prices here were an index to inflation, it would be pegged somewhere between the Weimar Republic and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
Add that they can’t get a delivery order right without feeding their counter-​guys healthy doses of Prozac and Adderal… well, you get the picture.
Izzy and Nat: get your act together — you can do so much better than this.

Izzy & Nat’s is a polarizing establishment. On one hand, we are dealing with a spot that has a relatively poor handle when it comes to service and keeping ingredients well-​stocked. Izzy actually ran out of multigrain and whole wheat toast by 1pm! They were forgetting our orders like serial daters forgetting names of dates he/​she went out with. Another patron was also overheard griping about how often his delivery orders are butchered. The fact that Izzy is the only real sit-​down diner/​brunch spot in the neighborhood can also allow it to rest on its laurels. Fortunately, that isn’t the case.
Yet, despite Izzy’s weaknesses, its strength (food) cannot be ignored. The food is truly excellent. Omelettes are very robust and served just right in terms of preparation — soft, fluffly, and not overcooked. An egg white omelette with caramelized onions, spinach, and mushrooms is a dream of a vegetarian option. The pastrami was thinly sliced and easy to eat without making a mess. The bagels are amazing in texture and taste. The cinnamon and raisin is an absolute winner. Even non-​bagel lovers couldn’t stop eating it. Of course, the Spicy Mary cream cheese had a lot to do with that. It was probably some of the best cream cheese I have ever had, and I can probably be convinced to just eat that cream cheese without any bread to spread it on!
Izzy and Nat’s is a fun place for a weekend brunch and comfort dining experience, especially for Battery Park City residents. There is definitely room for improvement, and all three stars are attributed to the quality of the food. If service truly gets better as management seeks and promises to improve, we are talking about a 4 or 5 star rating as far as a diner experience goes.

Good solid neighborhood place. Nicer than a diner but with similar food options. Perfect for eggs, bagels, sandwiches and salads. My favorite is the Matzoh Ball Soup.
Take the food away and sit on the benches in Battery Park.

Izzy & Nats is a great deli.
The food there is unbelievably good. Perhaps, astronomically banging is a more fitting description of the foods I tried.
The staff that I encountered were polite and happy to chat. A bubbly hostess /​waitress bid me adieu upon my exit.
Deli would be a bad word to describe the atmosphere and décor: this a kind of place you could comfortably sit down and eat at. Worth every penny.

Expensive, and just not that good. Spending nearly $ 20 for chicken salad on a roll and a small side of maraconi salad, and it went from average, at best, on the macaroni salad, to just bad on the chicken salad sandwich… tasted like either the chicken was bad, or they marinated it in vinegar before throwing it in the mayo.
And the search for a decent deli by WFC continues…

This is a bit of a weird place. The sign on the window boasts that they make their own hand-​rolled bagels on premises and when you walk in you see baskets containing hundreds of bagels. However, when my wife and I sat down and were handed menus we noted that the word «bagel» was nowhere to be found. This is a bit like eating at a steakhouse and not seeing the word «steak» anywhere on the menu. We asked the waiter why there were no bagel dishes on the menu and he said that Izzy & Nat’s forgot to put them on the menu.
We thought that was a bit odd but we ordered anyway. I had an omelette and my wife had a salad. My son had a bowl of soup and we each ordered a bagel with our meal. Long story short the food was pretty good. My omelette got the job done and the soup tasted fresh and homemade. Furthermore, the bagels were actually quite tasty. In my opinion they were well above average. They were so good that we bought a few to bring home.
The prices were reasonable, especially considering that the restaurant is in a very nice part of town. The portions were big, the waitstaff was friendly and the place was clean and well lit.
Now if only they will put the various bagel options on the menu…

Izzy & Nat’s is really a mixed bag. Learning how to manipulate the waiters is a challenge. Making sure you have enough chairs and silverware and glasses of water and that the right cream cheese is matched with the right bagel seems to be a consistent issue every time I go.
I feel similarly towards the food: chocolate babka is great, but the dinner food is very middling, the sort of warm and bland food I associate with the Early Bird Special menus.
Luckily, brunch is a different story. The Brooke’s Benny is really fantastic. Great eggs benedict over lox and potato pancakes. Crunchy and tasty and yummy. Creative enough to be a signature. :)

Visiting from California, the doorman recommended us to Izzy & Nat’s. They mentioned the fresh baked bagels and store made cream cheese.
When we walk in we notice the décor, it’s nice the booths are named after parts of NYC. My wife and I try the breakfast special and we are content with the food, bagels and cream cheese are delicious. Strong coffee. Service was average, we got seated quickly, and got coffee refills.
Second visit I order eggs benedict and they were super-​freaking-​delicious! They came with potato pancake and that was good as well. My wife asked for an egg sandwich and it was just bread and egg with a salad. We waited for almost 30 minutes before my wife stands up and tells the waitress that I was asking for coffee. Were they busy? NO! Just bad service. Different prices for take out and dine in? weird.
Wanted to return but the service was too much CRAP, even for New York standards.

So we only order out from here to pick up bagels. They are consistently unable to get the takeout orders right. The past 3 times I have ordered from here have been either wrong or missing an item.
Mediocre food in NYC is bad enough but stupid service is just plain silly.
I’ll be sticking to Leo’s for downtown bagels.

I’ve been dragged to it twice by my weird expatriate friend, who, the more I got out to eat with, the more I realize that he is not overly demanding about whether or not his food actually tastes good. Don’t get me wrong: this is a perfectly functional diner, in that it conveys a certain caloric meaning despite some disorder; in that way it is exactly like the convoluted grammatical structure of the previous sentence.
The food was just kinda neutrally bland: nothing memorable, just overpriced shmear on an anemic bagel, or an entirely utilitarian plate of eggs and bacon that John Stuart Mill himself might have once eaten. $ 5 does not seem to be the correct price to pay for said bagel, but we are shivering in the shadow of Goldman Sachs nearby, so perhaps no one here knows the proper valuation of things. Coffee a little on the astringent side.
I am clearly eating at the wrong places when I visit New York, or hanging out with wrong people who are not selective about the form their calories take. One day I will fix that.

I live in the neighborhood and have been here many times since they opened and they’ve always been a disappointment. They’ve changed their menu multiple times for the worse and the entire place is grossly overpriced for what you get (even for this area).
The food is very average/​sub-​par (even for a diner), and the recent additions to the menu are just bad. The chicken pot pie was tasteless. I’ve had better egg wraps at a street vendor. The deli sandwiches are alright, but not close to worth the price. I’ve had the brisket, pastrami, corned beef, reuben… each time they are just ‘ok’ — big portion of meat, but the meat quality is average. They don’t come with fries/​chips/​anything. I tried a pasta dish (trying to find something they can’t mess up) and there was a jalapeño oil that was way too overpowering and ruined the whole dish. I am not a picky eater, but this was disgusting. They used to have stuffed derma (which was good) but not anymore. They used to have kasha varnishkes, but they don’t now and haven’t taken it off their menu for months — go ahead and order it if you go, I guarantee they wont have it.
Their whitefish platter is very good. So are their salads. I’d stick to their fish platters from now on. As far as bagels & cream cheese go, those are good but expensive. Unfortunately for me, this area doesn’t have too many diners for Izzy’s to compete against. So I’m stuck coming here when my grandmother wants to go to a diner close to her place.
I just can’t get over the prices in this place for the quality you get! Passes as a deli, fails as a diner.

It’s convenient place for me as it locates downstairs of my place. I used to be a fan of their steak salad — w/​steak (so-​so), walnuts (raw), mixed greens, onions, goat cheese and cranberries (and chopped apple dices? cannot remember…)
All in a sudden… they changed… steak became less flavor and even worse, THEY STARTED USING SUGAR-​COATED WALNUT! — And the sugar coat was so thick that made it feels there’s no walnut inside! They lower the cheese quality at the same time as well…
Cannot accept… not going there for a long time after the change…

I came in here for a bagel and coffee due to the free tenka deal:
The place has a old NY diner feel to it.
The coffee was fine-​if I lived nearby and wanted a fix, I’d stop by here.
It seemed like pretty standard bagels that you can find in the city — Pretty good. Living in NYC you do get spoiled by all of delis, bagel shops and pizza places everywhere.

Cute little quasi-​diner in the Battery Park area. I came here for breakfast on the go: a bagel and a coffee. I was greeted by a friendly staff of two: a woman and a man (who gave me the impression he came straight from Hawaii).
The coffee was substandard, typical of any other New York diner. However, my everything bagel was perfectly toasted with just the right amount of butter to soak through but not drip out. Though somehow the garlic bits looked like they were burnt going through the toaster machine. A subtle saltiness but in a good way. This bagel had just the right proportion of garlic, sesame seeds, poppyseeds, and salt.

Izzy and Nat’s is part diner, part deli, offering up simple fare at eye bending prices. Walking inside, it looks just like a diner which is unlike any of the other restaurants in Battery Park City. At lunchtime, all of the tables are taken, and the place is humming. The menu is more like a deli/​bagel shop offering all of the classic sandwiches. Looking it over, I ordered a pastrami on rye and a side order of homemade chips to go. The order was prepared in record time. «That will be $ 17.91 sir». Keep in mind this is just a sandwich and chips, no drink, and the amount is the pre-​tip total. Yikes!
Okay, some places justifiably command a premium price for their outrageously delicious sandwiches. Katz’s comes to mind, as does Wichcraft which specializes in gourmet versions of sandwiches which are memorably good. Surely at this price point, Izzy and Nat’s must be serving up the best sandwiches in the country. Um, no. Not even close. My pastrami sandwich had a generous amount of meat, but none of it was memorable or inspiring. The quality of meat was consistent with any mediocre deli or what could be obtained in a supermarket. This meat was definitely not buttery in any way. Indeed, the sandwich became tedious to eat by the end. The chips were okay though and were obviously homemade. I liked the pickle.
At half the price, I would recommend the place. At the current prices, I can only cry out ROBBERY. I will not be back.

This is a great spot for weekend brunch if you’re looking to spend a day exploring the Battery Park neighborhood. Brunch is really tasty. Eggs Norwegian are so good.
We had awesome service, and were able to joke and have fun with our server, which made this place really comfortable. Décor is bright and fun, and the deli counter is clean.