Horn & Hardart Automats to return to NYC from the dead — if this determined millennial gets his way

Walk along West 38th Street in the Garment District and you’ll catch a glimpse of one of the last remaining Horn & Hardart signs in the city, painted a lifetime ago on the brick back of 1385 Broadway.

The Automat has been gone so long that many New Yorkers wouldn’t recognize it. The rest may feel a pang of nostalgia for the long-lost self-service restaurant chain that fed generations of working stiffs weekday lunches of pot pie and baked beans at affordable prices.

David Arena is only 35, but to the entrepreneur and serial startup guy from Philadelphia, that faded “ghost sign” looks like the future. He’s confident he will bring the Automat back from the dead.

And he thinks he can get the first location open within the year.  

Call that blind optimism, maybe, the millennial admits cheerfully. But then again, to wake up every day believing that you’re the guy who’s going to bring H&H’s homespun mac-‘n’-cheese charm to the cynical, $17 salad-choked streets of post-pandemic Midtown, you’ve got to be some kind of dreamer.

And this dreamer calls the project “his life’s calling.”