El Faro — 823 Greenwich Street
The oldest Spanish restaurant in New York, open from 1927 to 2012, and the last of Little Spain to go.
El Faro stood on the corner of Greenwich and Horatio — 823 Greenwich Street, also addressed as 66 Horatio Street — a few blocks below the stretch of 14th Street that New York called Little Spain. It opened in 1927 as a Spanish bar and grill under Manuel Rivas and Edwardo Cabana, both Galicians, and when it closed in 2012 it was the oldest Spanish restaurant in the city.
It opened in the middle of Prohibition, and for its first six years it ran a second trade as a clandestine drinking place — which is how a good many New York restaurants of that generation survived their first decade.
It was known for Galician cooking carried over whole — the paella, the green sauce, the garlic — served in a narrow room that changed very little across eighty-five years. It later carried three stars in The New York Times, and in 1996 the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation gave it a Village Award.
The building is eighty years older than the restaurant. It is one of five Greek Revival row houses at 58–66 Horatio Street, built in 1845–46.
From Vigo to Greenwich Street
In 1941 the restaurant was bought by José Pérez, born in Vigo, his family from Celanova in the province of Ourense. He had crossed to the United States in the first half of the century and started out in the trade as a cook. He went on to run El Faro for some sixty years.
That is the shape of the whole quarter in one life: a Galician who arrives with nothing, works in someone else’s kitchen, and ends up owning the room. The Spanish of 14th Street followed the same curve — many of them arriving as merchant seamen who left their ships at the Chelsea piers, and who by the nineteen-fifties owned the shops, the restaurants and the buildings along the block.
The clientele reflected it. Galician sailors, Spanish political exiles who came after 1939, and the occasional famous face — Marlon Brando among them.
The Pérez family, on camera
It was José Pérez and his son Joe Pérez who ran El Faro at the end. Both generations speak in Little Spain: A Century of History — the father who worked the restaurant through the decades when 14th Street was still Spanish, and the son who kept it open into a neighbourhood that no longer was.
Theirs is one of the few first-hand accounts of the trade of Little Spain recorded on camera. The restaurant closed two years after the film’s research began.
The end, 2012
El Faro shut in 2012 after it was unable to meet some eighty thousand dollars in fines and costs. It did not reopen. Of the Spanish houses that made the district — Casa Moneo, La Iberia, La Bilbaína, Trocadero Valencia, Bar Coruña, Café Madrid, the church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe — El Faro was the last standing.
Eighty-five years, two families, one room. In September 2026 New York City co-named the corner of 14th Street and Eighth Avenue Little Spain — La Nacional Way. By then El Faro had been closed for fourteen years.
