Sometimes for special occasions Mimi Sheraton's family, the Solomons, came in from Brooklyn to dine on German food among the oil paintings, beer steins, mahogany paneling, chandeliers, mirrors, hunting trophies and the occasional celebrity in the vast dining room of Luchow's, the venerable landmark of the Gilded Age. This was the model for Harmonia Gardens in "Hello, Dolly." It had an orchestra whose theme song was “Down where the Wurzburger Flows." A sign at the entrance said "Through this door pass all the famous people of the world. " It was said Diamond Jim Brady used to weigh himself after a meal at the scale in the front.
When Luchow's first opened on East Fourteenth Street what is now the East Village was Little Germany and Fourteenth Street was the city's entertainment district, Macy's, Tiffany and Brentano's were on Union Square. There were a number of other grand German and Hungarian beer halls and restaurants as well as plebeian pretzel and beer joints on Fourteenth Street. In 1946 Luchow's was one of the few survivors on 14th Street from that era. The tourists' Little Germany had become Yorkville on the Upper East Side although much of the city's German-American population had moved to Brooklyn and the Bronx and more recently to Queens and the suburbs. Sheraton remembers the restaurant's herring, pea soup, sauerbraten, schnitzel, strudel and apple pancakes as family favorites.
German restaurants were very popular until the First World War. The war provoked a lot of anti-German sentiment. Then Prohibition did in most of the beer halls that had survived the anti-German fervor. After the rise of Hitler, many Jews would have have nothing to do with anything German although others saw places like Luchow's as nostalgic relics of a bygone era and the epitome of grand dining rather than as outposts of the Third Reich.