Chock Full o’ Branding

Even before I moved to New York in the 1960s, I knew about Chock Full o’ Nuts. To a Chicagoan who had grown up gazing eastward, Chock Full o’ Nuts was one of those idiosyncratic brands – along with Macy’s, the Garden and the Automat – that just screamed the crowded sidewalks, caverns of tall buildings and zooming taxicabs of Manhattan.

Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee shops were almost as ubiquitous then as Duane Reade drugstores are now. This was, of course, decades before Starbucks and yuppie espresso makers, when a cup of coffee in the city was just something to get you going in the morning, with a cigarette or a bagel and a schmear.

Was Chock Full o’ Nuts gourmet coffee? Who knew? Gourmet wasn’t much part of our everyday vocabulary. And when it was, it was more associated with the truffles at Lutece than with a cup of coffee at some lunch counter.

Eventually, Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee shops disappeared, though the brand’s recognizable “heavenly coffee” cans of red, green and black with the checkerboard trim remained on supermarket shelves.

But earlier this month, a Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee shop opened on East 23rd Street in New York, offering not only coffee but also the fondly remembered whole-wheat doughnuts, nut-and-cream-cheese sandwiches, grilled hot dogs and split pea soup.

Why now, at a time when even Starbucks is cutting back on its locations? The reasoning has a peculiar logic to it. Developer Joe Bruno told The New York Times that Chock Full o’ Nuts, which began as a nut shop in the 1920s, began to thrive as a coffee shop during the Depression. “And we’re in a recession now,” Bruno said. “Comfort food is always something that people gravitate to.”

Plans are underway to develop 50 of these restaurants throughout the city, in all the boroughs except Staten Island. There’s already a second one going up, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn.

Will it succeed? The food business is a tricky game, but it might succeed if its locations are good, its food is good and its prices are even better. One thing for sure: New Yorkers of a certain age will give it a try because of its nostalgia factor, because it harkens back to other times, when  when they were younger, when unemployment was lower, when Ohrbach’s and B. Altman and Gimbel’s were still around, when Broadway tickets were $5, when garments were actually being made in those buildings on Seventh Avenue, not in Taiwan and the Czech Republic.

And that, class, is what we mean when we talk about “the power of the brand!”