Those looking for a lazy weekend brunch after a big night out should stop reading here: Shopsin’s General Store is not for you. Because in order to handle a meal at Shopsin’s, you need to begin conserving your strength the night before. Reopened last year on the Lower East Side after decades on Carmine Street, the alcove-sized eatery is an outpost of old New York — a pop-and-kids operation where you’re served only if the boss (and resident force of nature) Kenny Shopsin decides he likes you. Shopsin’s isn’t a pleasant place to linger, unless volleying obscenities and eavesdropping neighbors are your idea of pleasant. Coffee comes from a pot, not an espresso machine; water comes in plastic cups; there are no Sunday mimosas. In fact, Kenny doesn’t work on Sundays. And probably not during terrible weather, either, or when the Mets are on a losing streak, or under any other perceived or actual inclemency.
Picking up a cell phone can get you booted. Your toast-nibbling friend will have to order a full meal or get the hell out. And don’t try to show up with a crowd: the Shopsins won’t seat parties of more than four. Even if you pretend your five is really two and three. They’ll know. But toe the line and Kenny Shopsin (and his equally colorful children) will reward you with the best pulled pork omelet or lemon-ricotta pancakes in town. Along with one hell of a sideshow.
Shopsin’s is a direct extension of the proprietor-king himself — the grizzled curmudgeon behind the stove given to spouting obscenities and profundities, often in the same wheezing breath. Two parts crass, one part charming, a puff of gray hair peeking out from under his Mets cap, Kenny carries the unmistakable bulk of sixty-plus years of pancakes in a belly that strains against his red suspenders. He’s clearly a man you can trust with your brunch.
Which is good, because Shopsin’s is, at least in theory, a diner, with a menu as massive and unpredictable as the chef. Its two ever-evolving pages include 38 kinds of pancakes and 71 soups, fried okra and chorizo polenta and El Paso shepherd’s pie. The cornmeal nshima, with pumpkin-stewed vegetables, is enough to make one wonder why Zambian food hasn’t taken off. Individual dishes may seem unlikely (mac’n’ cheese pancakes? egg?), but only until the first bite. It’s the Gravity’s Rainbow of short-order cooking — everything is incorporated, nothing is explained, and yet the end result makes some kind of wholly unique and unexpected sense.
Like, for example, Blisters on My Sisters, a welcome perversion of huevos rancheros: rice, beans and greens slapped on corn tortillas, broiled with cheese and sunny-side up eggs. Or Postmodern Pancakes: chopped, stirred into batter and fried into meta-pancakes. Or peanut butter Slutty Cakes and caramel-cornmeal Ho Cakes. “Pancakes are a luxury… like smoking marijuana or having sex,” says Kenny, by way of explaining the off-color names. “As far as food value, you might as well take Crisco, whip it up with powdered sugar, and spread it on your face.”
The new menu has slimmed down dramatically from the eleven-page version at Kenny’s first restaurant. His general store, opened in 1973, evolved into an eatery that quickly became a neighborhood favorite — a cluttered dining room where board games sat on the tables, and brunch could last into the evening. A sign hung over the kitchen door: “All Our Cooks Wear Condoms.” Kenny’s wife, Eve, presided over the diners and offered free candy after the check. That Shopsin’s, like most of the character in the Village, was wiped out by rising rents years ago. Eve is gone, too, a victim of lung cancer at 57. But Kenny soon discovered a space at the Essex Street Market, and three of Eve’s children took her place to help run the business. (“I miss her,” says Kenny. “But now I can fart in my own house.”)
The new Shopsin’s is at its best on weekdays, when business is slow and the family is in proper form. Zack Shopsin mans the counter, offering suggestions before firing the griddle. “Of course they’re good!” he’ll say pleasantly to an elderly woman asking about the poached eggs. “I don’t cook bad shit.” His twin sisters wait tables, and his father sits in the doorway, sizing up passersby. From there, Kenny waxes profane on everything from the environment (“If we were ecologically smarter, we’d breed humans a foot shorter and add three stories to each house”) to the nature of childhood (“That’s fuckin’ life: illusion followed by disillusion”).
Easy to sketch, perhaps, but impossible to define, Kenny has inspired many to try. The New Yorker paints him as a “grumpy, behemoth philosopher,” variously a “nasty, embittered old man” and a “wise, appreciative purveyor of life lessons.” Not to be outdone, New York Magazine calls him a “profane prince of the New York short-order world” and “a dyspeptic Shelley Winters.” Kenny decries those who would publicize him, but evades media attention the same way Lindsay Lohan does — dramatically. (The first time he laid eyes on this reporter, he snorted, asked his son, “Why the fuck is this tasty morsel spying into my restaurant?”— and informed her and her notebook that they’d need to get the fuck out.) But the more he abuses the press, of course — chasing cameras and nosy quote-seekers from his restaurant — the more eagerly they pursue him.
Longtime friend and food writer Ed Levine never quite accepted his contrariness. “Kenny professes to hate publicity,” says Levine. “I think he kind of likes it, but doesn’t want to admit it.” Case in point is Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin, which just came out, co-authored by the man himself. Equal parts cookbook and manifesto, it touches on Kenny’s past with characteristically off-color nostalgia, recalling a childhood spent dipping into his mother’s purse to fund a White Castle habit. Though candid in many ways, Kenny doesn’t feel the need to explain himself or his kitchen secrets. (“Heat the tortillas however you like to heat tortillas,” reads a typical instruction.) But the philosophy cited in the title isn’t far below the surface. Food and life, essentially, are inseparable. For Kenny, to cook well — with passion and creativity and love for whomever you’re serving — is to live well.
The ultimate promise of Shopsin’s is, perhaps, uniquely American: come as you are, your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, for strong black coffee and country-scrambled eggs. “It is like a club,” Kenny conceded in a 2005 interview, “but a club where the only thing you need for membership is to act like a member. But a lot of people come in and want to audit the place. They want to watch us be ourselves, but they don’t want to be themselves.” To belong at Shopsin’s, then, “is not something you earn. It’s something you just are.”
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
