1、The New Yorker, April 15, 2002 DONT MENTION IT: The hidden life and times of a Greenwich Village restaurant By Calvin Trillin I suppose Kenny Shopsin, who runs a small restaurant a couple of blocks from where I live in Greenwich Village, could qualify as eccentric in a number of ways, but one of his
2、 views seems particularly strange to journalists who have had prolonged contact with proprietors of retail businesses in New York: he hates publicity. Ive tried not to take this personally. I have been a regular customer, mainly at lunch, since 1982, when Kenny and his wife, Eve, turned a corner gro
3、cery store they had been running on the same premises into a thirty-four-seat caf. Before that, I was a regular customer of the grocery store. When the transformation was made, my daughters were around junior-high-school age, and even now, grown and living out of the city, they consider Shopsins Gen
4、eral Storeor Ken and Eves or Kennys, as they usually call itan extension of their kitchen. Normally, they take only a brief glance at the menua menu that must include about nine hundred items, some of them as unusual as Cotton Picker Gumbo Melt Soup or Hanoi Hoppin John with Shrimp or Bombay Turkey
5、Cloud Sandwichand then order dishes that are not listed, such as “tomato soup the way Sarah likes it” or “Abigails chow fun.” When Kenny gets a phone call from a restaurant guidebook that wants to include Shopsins, he sometimes says that the place is no longer in operation, identifying himself as so
6、meone who just happens to be there moving out the fixtures. Some years ago, a persistent English guidebook carried a generally complimentary review of Shopsins that started with a phrase like “Although it has no dcor.” Eve expressed outrage, not simply at the existence of the review but also at its
7、content. “Do you call this no dcor?” she demanded of me one evening when I was there having an early supperthe only kind of supper you can have at Shopsins, which has not strayed far from grocery-store hours. (Aside from a Sunday brunch that began as a sort of family project several months ago, the
8、restaurant has never been open on weekends.) She waved her arm to take in the entire establishment. I looked around. Shopsins still looks a lot like a corner store. It has an old pressed-tin ceiling. There are shelves, left over from the grocery store, that are always piled high and not terribly nea
9、tly with ingredients and supplies. There are always newspapers and magazines around for the customer who might need reading material while eating alone. A table setup might include a constantly varying assortment of toys and puzzlesa custom that started when the Shopsins children were young and cont
10、inues for the more or less grownup customers. The counter, which no longer has stools, is taken up mainly by buckets of complimentary penny candy. One wall has, in addition to a three-dimensional advertisement for Oscar Mayer beef franks, some paintings of the place and its denizens. The portrait of
11、 Kenny shows him as a bushy-haired man with a baby face that makes him look younger than he is, which is nearly sixty, and a girth that may reflect years of tasting his more remarkable creations; hes wearing a Shopsins General Store T-shirt, folded over in the way the cognoscenti know how to fold it
12、 in order to form the words “Eat Me.” A large sign behind the tiny kitchen that Kenny shares with his longtime assistant, Jos, says “All Our Cooks Wear Condoms.” When I had taken in all of that, or whatever part of it was there at the time, I said, “I absolutely agree, Eve. A reviewer might comment
13、on whether or not the dcor is to his taste. Conceivably, he could prefer another type of dcor. But you cant say that this place has no dcor.” Normally, mentions of Shopsins in print are complimentary, in a sort of left-handed wayas in Time Out New Yorks most recent guide to the citys restaurants, wh
14、ich raved about the soups and described Kenny (“the foul-mouthed middle-aged chef and owner”) as “a culinary genius, if for no other reason than he figured out how to fit all his ingredients into such a tiny restaurant.” To Kennys way of thinking, a complimentary mention is worse than a knock. It br
15、ings review-trottersthe sort of people who go to a restaurant because somebody told them to. Kenny finds that review-trotters are often “petulant and demanding.” Failing to understand that they are not in a completely conventional restaurant, they may be taken aback at having the person next to them
16、 contribute a sentence or two to their conversation or at hearing Kenny make a general remark in language not customarily heard in company unless the company is in a locker room or at being faced with deciding among nine hundred items and then, if they have selected certain dishes, having to indicat
17、e the degree of spiciness on a scale of one to ten. (Before Shopsins began restricting its serving staff to Eve, it employed a waitress who narrowed at least that choice by refusing to take an order higher than a six, on humanitarian grounds.) Ken and Eve have found that review-trotters often dont k
18、now their own minds. If a customer at Shopsins seems completely incapable of deciding what to order, Eve will, in the interest of saving time, reveal her own favorites, which these days happen to be three dishes with chicken in themChicken Tortilla Avocado Soup, Pecan Chicken Wild Rice Cream Enchila
19、da, and Taco Fried Chicken. But she doesnt do it with a song in her heart. Kenny is less flexible. “If somebody comes in here and is flabbergasted by the number of things on the menu and tells me, How can I choose? “ he has said, “I realize that theyre essentially in the wrong restaurant.” The place
20、 can handle just so many people, and Kenny was never interested in an expansion that would transform him into a supervisor. “The economic rhythm of this place is that I run fifteen meals a week,” he used to say before Shopsins offered Sunday brunch. “If I do any five of them big, I break even; if I
21、do ten of them big, Ill make money. Ill make a lot of money. But if I do fifteen I have to close, because its too much work.” Kenny requires slow periods for recouping energy and ingredients. The techniques that enable him to offer as many dishes as he does are based on the number of people he has t
22、o serve rather than on what they order. Thats why he wont do takeout, and thats one of the reasons parties of five are told firmly that the restaurant does not serve groups larger than four. Pretending to be a party of three that happened to have come in with a party of two is a very bad idea. Not a
23、ll the rules at Shopsins are based on the number of meals that the kitchen has to put out. For years, a rule against copying your neighbors order was observed fairly strictly. Customers who had just arrived might ask someone at the next table the name of the scrumptious-looking dish he was eating. H
24、aving learned that it was Burmese Hummusone of my favorites, as it happens, even though it is not hummus and would not cause pangs of nostalgia in the most homesick Burmesethey might order Burmese Hummus, only to have Eve shake her head wearily. No copying. That rule eventually got downgraded into w
25、hat Ken called “a strong tradition,” and has now pretty much gone by the wayside. “I realized that the problem was not that they were trying to imitate the other person but that they werent capable of ordering anything themselves, and it was just unnecessary cruelty to point that out to them,” Kenny
26、 told me not long ago. He said he was getting more and more people of that sort. ”Why is that?” I asked. ”The countrys going that way,” he said glumly. Because Shopsins has a number of rules and because Kenny is, by his own admission, “not a patient person,” its common to run into people who are afr
27、aid to enter the place. Ive escorted a number of them to their first Shopsins meal, in the way a longtime businessman in a Midwestern town might escort a newcomer to Kiwanis at noon on Wednesday. Since the “Seinfeld” Soup Nazi episode became part of the culture, people sometimes compare Kenny to the
28、 brilliant but rule-obsessed soup purveyor who terrified Jerry Seinfeld and his friends. Kenny would say that one difference between him and the Soup Nazi is that the Soup Nazi is shown ladling out his soup from a steam table; at Shopsins, most soups are made from scratch when theyre ordered. Some p
29、eople think of Shopsins as forbiddingly clubby, chilly to outsiders. Actually, Shopsins does not have a crowd, in the sense of a group of people who go in assuming theyll run into someone they knowthe way the old Lions Head, a few blocks uptown, had a crowd, built around Village Voice writers. At a
30、play reading once, I was surprised to run into a Shopsins regular I hadnt realized was an actor; all Id known about him was that he doted on a dish called Turkey Spinach Cashew Brown Rice Burrito. Still, there are a lot of regulars, and they seem more at home than they might at a conventional restau
31、rant. “Youre really not allowed to be anonymous here,” Kenny has said. “You have to be willing to be who you really are. And that scares a lot of people.” One evening, when the place was nearly full, I saw a party of four come in the door; a couple of them may have been wearing neckties, which would
32、nt have been a plus in a restaurant whose waitress used to wear a T-shirt that said “Die Yuppie Scum.” Kenny took a quick glance from the kitchen and said, “No, were closed.” After a brief try at appealing the decision, the party left, and the waitress pulled the security gate partway down to discou
33、rage other latecomers. ”Its only eight oclock,” I said to Kenny. ”They were nothing but strangers,” he said. ”I think those are usually called customers,” I said. “They come here, you give them food, they give you money. Its known as the restaurant business.” Kenny shrugged. “Fuck em,” he said. Anyt
34、ime there seemed to be a threat of my becoming entangled in a piece of unauthorized publicity about Shopsins, I have resorted to rank cowardice, spooked by the fear of a lifetime banishment that might not even carry the possibility of parole. Once, I asked Kenny if an acquaintance of mine whod been
35、eighty-sixed some years before but greatly missed the place and its proprietors could come in for lunch with me sometime. “Sure, she can come in for lunch,” Kenny said. “And Ill tell her shes a scumbag bitch.” I told him I might hold off on that lunch for a while. In the mid-nineties, I got a phone
36、call from a reporter named D. T. Max, who was doing a piece for the New York Observer on Shopsins, without the coperation of the proprietor. After assuring him of my belief that reporters have an obligation to talk to other reporters on the record and informing him that I had been quoted by name ins
37、ulting most of the people Ive ever worked for, I told him that in this instance I intended to be exceedingly circumspect and to keep Kenny informed of everything I said. Max was most understanding. When I did report back to Kenny, I was asked what information I had surrendered. “Well, the subject of
38、 Egyptian Burritos came up,” I said. Egyptian Burrito was then listed on the breakfast menu, although Id never eaten one. On the rare occasions that I had been to Shopsins for what people in some other trades might call a breakfast meeting, Id always allocated my calories to Shred Potatoes, a fabulo
39、us dish that Kenny claims to have stolen from a short-order cook in the Carolinas through intense observation that required only ten minutes. ”And?” Kenny asked. ”Well, he seemed interested in what an Egyptian Burrito was,” I said. ”So what did you say?” ”I said, An Egyptian Burrito is a burrito, an
40、d inside is sort of what Kenny thinks Egyptians might eat. “ Kenny considered that for a moment. “Well, thats accurate,” he finally said. He sounded relieved. By chance, though, the Observer piece ended with an anecdote, accurately gathered from someone else, that involved me: One morning, a Sanitat
41、ion Department officer had come in to ticket Kenny for some minor infraction like wrapping his garbage incorrectly or putting it in the wrong place. Kenny, who was at the stove, lost his temper and threw a handful of flour he happened to be holding at the sanitation officer, who thereupon summoned a
42、 police officer to write a citation. When I was told about the incident at lunch that day, I asked Kenny, “What was the citation forassault with intent to bake?” A couple of months after Maxs piece appeared, Kenny said he had finally concluded that I, frustrated at not having been able to work the a
43、ssault-with-intent-to-bake line in anywhere, might have instigated an article in the Observer just to get it into print. I had a defense for that: within days of my exchange with Kenny about flour-throwing, I had, without mentioning any names, eased the anecdote into a newspaper column that was on a
44、 completely different subject. Yes, Ive managed to write about Shopsins from time to time, always observing the prohibition against mentioning its name or location. That is one reason Ive never been offended by Kennys refusal to recognize a reporters God-given right to turn absolutely everything int
45、o copy. In a piece about Greenwich Village a few years ago, for instance, I asked a restaurant proprietor “who tends not to be cordial to people wearing suits” what the difference was between the Village and uptown, and he said, “I dont know. Ive never been uptown.” Kenny has never objected to any o
46、f the mentions. He has always thought of us as being in similar fields, and, as someone who has to be prepared every day to turn out any one of nine hundred dishes a customer might ask for, he has a deep understanding of waste not, want not. In the mid-seventies, in fact, when my daughters were litt
47、le girls, I wrote an entire article for this magazine about a corner store in the West Village which was run with rare imagination and a warm feeling for communitya store with a rocking chair and bean-counting contests and free circulating paperback books. At that time, the store struck me as being
48、about as close as Greenwich Village got to the Village conjured up by reading, say, “My Sister Eileen”even to the point of having a proprietor, described in the piece as a young man from a prosperous background whod always had what he called “a little trouble with authority,” capable of making occas
49、ional allusions to Camus or Sartre as he sliced the roast beef. At the time, Kenny owned some dazzling old gumball machines, and I simply referred to Shopsins by the name my girls always usedthe Bubble Gum Store. So why am I calling it Shopsins now? Because not long ago Kenny told me that it was no longer necessary to abide by the rule against mentioning the place in print. The building that Shopsins is in, an undistinguished five-story brick structure that consists of the restaurant and e
