For the past few decades, a taste of Old New York could be savored at Nat Sherman Tobacco on Fifth Ave., whose ambiance all but invited you to hang your Borsalino by the door and light a cigar. The bad news: Nat Sherman has moved. The good news: it’s relocated a stone’s throw away down the avenue. The better news: they’ve kept that defiantly Old ambiance — from the grand façade and the signature clock, to the glass storefront and wooden cabinetry, it’s a storefront that Nat Sherman (who opened his original tobacco store in the Garment District in the grip of the Great Depression) would have been proud of.

The whole enterprise might have started twenty blocks further down (and moved a couple locations in the intervening years), but its presence in midtown is no accident, according to Nat’s son, company president and CEO Joel Sherman. “We were up on 55th for a while, but that’s Gucci; that’s not who we are,” he says. “We represent the grit in the city and that’s the way we’ve been since 1930. Were not fashionable, we’re Old New York.” The best news is it’s far more in the spirit of Old New York than any Manhattan tobacconist in recent memory.

In the giant cigar vault of the new store, Bill Sherman points to a sign still under construction: The Johnson Room. It’s a new space that nonetheless exudes a particular coziness. “It’s a nickname my grandfather had for my grandmother.” Bill is the son of Joel. Along with siblings Larry and Michelle, he represents the third generation of the family business. And the heart of the business is the store (wherever it may be) and the atmosphere it exudes.

“We want it to be comfortable. I think a store that’s brass and glass is intimidating,” says Joel Sherman. “I think a store that’s shabby is uninviting. So we try and create an atmosphere and experience, a lifestyle experience that’s befitting a good cigar, and the good life without saying it’s exclusive.”

Helping to create that vision was Charles McCarry, a famed Hollywood and Broadway set designer (who worked on the preceding store), and Jack A. Michaelson, of the architectural firm Design Consortium, who oversaw the freestanding exterior of the new building. Indeed, the interior, a cavernous 5700 square-foot space decorated with antiques from both the former Sherman location and an old tobacco store in London, could easily double as a film set.

If that’s the case, it’s also a set that serves coffee from the lounge area in the basement. Humidor lockers (some of them, inevitably, belonging to the super-rich and famous) allow clients easy access to their prized sticks. “Rudy Giuliani has also used our office and our conference room because he can’t smoke in his office. We don’t charge him,” Joel says with a laugh that echoes up to the 30-foot ceiling. Nat Sherman has also been doing its own cigar line for years. Their very first cigar was a product of Tampa, a blend of Cuban and American tobaccos, slow burning and with much care applied to the packaging. Further blends have been developed; the new ones, to celebrate the store opening, are a limited-edition aged blend called the Bench Selection, and a set of tube cigars befittingly known as the 489 collection.

Adorning the façade of the store is a Nat Sherman landmark clock. It’s a distinctive piece of mechanical art, and yet another way the store attempts to recall a previous era. But it’s what exists inside that will determine whether cigar-smokers will separate themselves from the ever-passing crowds outside and enter. “I have a firm belief and philosophy that there’s only one expert in the cigar business,” emphasizes Joel, along with his family the inheritor of a legacy, “and that’s the smoker.”

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