TRILLIN ON SHOPSIN'S

Ah yes. I remember when the great Calvin Trillin wrote a piece about Shopsin's in the New Yorker. That was April 2002 if I recall...

I've excerpted it here from the New Yorker's fun website. This may help you see why so many of us are buzz buzz buzzing about the fact that this storied (and quirky) West Village restaurant is coming to Carroll Gardens. Part of the fascination is just imagining Kenny Shopsin and his wife actually leaving Bedford Street. Crossing the bridge. Taking the subway? (Blueberry French Toast pix by Roboppy).

         

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 views seems particularly strange to journalists who have had prolonged contact with proprietors of retail businesses in New York: he hates publicity. I've 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 grocery store they had been running on the same premises into a thirty-four-seat café. 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 Shopsin's General Store—or Ken and Eve's or Kenny's, as they usually call it—an extension of their kitchen. Normally, they take only a brief glance at the menu—a 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 Cloud Sandwich—and then order dishes that are not listed, such as "tomato soup the way Sarah likes it" or "Abigail's chow fun."

When Kenny gets a phone call from a restaurant guidebook that wants to include Shopsin's, he sometimes says that the place is no longer in operation, identifying himself as someone who just happens to be there moving out the fixtures. Some years ago, a persistent English guidebook carried a generally complimentary review of Shopsin's that started with a phrase like "Although it has no décor." Eve expressed outrage, not simply at the existence of the review but also at its content. "Do you call this 'no décor'?" she demanded of me one evening when I was there having an early supper—the only kind of supper you can have at Shopsin's, 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 restaurant has never been open on weekends.) She waved her arm to take in the entire establishment.