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.