ON THE MENU: OTBKB

A mention of OTBKB in Kayleen Schaefer's piece. "On the Menu: Rumors Greatly Exaggerated" about Shopsins, the legendary West Village restaurant.  From today's City Section. After looking at all the photos tagged Shosins on Flickr.com  I am pining for pancakes at Shopsins. But you won't be able to get near the place today. Anyone wanna meet me there sometime?

MANY stories have been told about Kenny Shopsin, who for nearly a quarter of a century has run a small and deeply idiosyncratic restaurant that bears his name on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village.

Quirky does not begin to describe the place. It is well known that Mr. Shopsin, 63, who is of an imposing size and wears a red bandanna around his head, will not seat groups larger than four. He will also tell you to leave if he sees you using your cellphone and will comment on your order. One recent Sunday morning during Passover, Mr. Shopsin popped out of the kitchen and demanded: "Who ordered the ham-and-cheese omelet with matzo? I've got to know." None of his customers fessed up.

The latest story about Mr. Shopsin, reported about a month ago in New York magazine and The Daily News, is that he and his restaurant are relocating to Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. The news caused a stir in the city's foodie and trend-following circles.

As it turns out, reports of the move have been greatly exaggerated; Mr. Shopsin insists that he is not packing up anytime soon. "I have no place to move to, no lease, no prospects," he said in an interview. In fact, he added, he has six and a half years left on his current lease.

The story got started, he said, when a reporter overheard him in the restaurant chatting with friends and family about moving to Brooklyn. He did investigate buying a building in Carroll Gardens, he said, but added, "I've been looking at buildings for the past 20 years of my life."

Shopsin's became famous when Calvin Trillin wrote about the place in The New Yorker in 2002, before it moved from Bedford Street to a more visible location on Carmine Street. Since then, its 900-item menu of comfort food like chicken-avocado-tortilla soup and shrimp-bacon-egg superhash has been as much in demand as the fare at neighboring multistar restaurants like Babbo.

The recent story of the move spread quickly, leading customers to stream in for what they feared might be a final local serving of macaroni and cheese pancakes.

Noa Paffet, a 26-year-old software programmer who lives on Hudson Street, went to Shopsin's twice in a weekend after she read it was moving. "I had a culinary freakout," she wrote on her Web log, Stilettos on Cobblestone, adding that she ate a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate milkshake on Saturday and white-chocolate-macadamia-nut pancakes and an Orange Julius on Sunday.

Over in Brooklyn, residents speculated about the possible new location, and some who had moved to the borough from Manhattan felt vindicated by reports that Shopsin's was following them there.

Louise Crawford, who lives in Park Slope, relayed the story of the move on her blog, Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn. "To me, it was satisfying," she said in an interview. "Because how can you be edgy in Manhattan anymore?"

As for Mr. Shopsin, he concedes that he may wind up in Brooklyn when he decides he does not want to work so hard.

"When I'm 74," he said, "I don't know that I'm going to want to pump out enough eggs to pay the rent in the West Village."

Picture of menu board at Shopsins from Pheezy