Isn’t It Just A Bunch Of Cream Cheese?

The simplest pleasures have the most convoluted history:

It is, at most, a footnote to what the world remembers about Junior’s, one of New York’s storied restaurants, a footnote to its famous recipe for one of the things that people think of when they think of New York. Jeffrey Horowitz acknowledges all that.

But when he heard a radio report recently that Junior’s, the Brooklyn palace of cheesecake as well as corned beef, was building a 180-seat restaurant near Times Square, he decided it was time to make the case for the footnote. He decided it was time to tell a story that has been forgotten, except, it seems, by his family.

It is a story of three families — his and two others — and the restaurant business after World War II. That much seems certain. According to him, it is also the story of a $100-a-year licensing agreement, a corporate bankruptcy and the recipe for Junior’s quintessential cheesecake.

The family that has run Junior’s since it opened in 1950 flatly denies Mr. Horowitz’s account of how the cheesecake originated, and disputes other parts of his story. But there are some elements of both families’ stories that appear to match, though others can no longer be verified — they are lost in the memories of people who have died. So there is really no way to prove or disprove Mr. Horowitz’s version of who did what to the cheesecake, or his other claims.