“You’re a one-woman Shopsin’s West!”
High praise from a fellow NYC-expat as I dished him up some eggs — soft-scrambled with hot dogs, cheddar, tomatoes, onions, tossed noodles and curry sauce — served with cottage cheese sprinkled with Penzey’s Szechuan Pepper Salt and slathered with ketchup.
Shopsin’s, you see, was a singular Greenwich Village spot known as much for its irreverent proprietor as its uniquely-named dishes that sometimes combined things that had never before shared a plate, like Plantain Pulled Turkey Soup with Strawberry BBQ Rice, Mexican Moo Shu Pork and Hanoi Hoppin’ John with Shrimp.
If you ordered Blisters on my Sisters, you’d get a huevos rancheros-type creation that owed its name to Frank Zappa’s “Jewish Princess:”
“I want a dainty little Jewish princess with a couple of sisters who can raise a few blisters.”
It’s hard to imagine a neighborhood place with an owner who swore like a pro and occasionally threw people out as being welcoming, but, in its way, it was.
Kenny and Eve Shopsin opened their grocery store in 1973 — a packed-to-the-rafters, timeworn affair with tin ceilings. Continuing the former owner’s tradition they offered roast beef, and, little by little, other take-out fare. Soon there were lines out the door. The Shopsins had children of their own who hung out there, so they made it a community place, complete with paperback lending library and rocking chair.
In 1983 Shopsin’s General Store became a small restaurant that quickly achieved local cult status. The “local” part being fine with Kenny, who wanted no publicity — no city-wide trade — so he didn’t give interviews. He also disdained food critics and wouldn’t talk with them, either.
He was outrageous. As I mentioned, he swore (see Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker stories for samples), and would eighty-six people he didn’t think fit in. Kenny had a number of rules. For example, Shopsin’s would not seat a party greater than four. In fact, there was something on the back of the menu discouraging any form of cheating, like pretending your party of three happened to run into another party of two and then you all decided to eat together. Nope. Could get you banned.
Rules were enforced more or less by whim. Like not being allowed any form of “I’ll have what she’s having.” Kenny thought that if you were not capable of making a choice on your own, you shouldn’t be there. It didn’t matter to him that, at its peak, there were about 900 items on the menu.
One page of Shopsin’s 11-page-long menu from 2002. Courtesy of Internet Archive.
According to his 2008 biography, Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin, if you ordered a coffee “to go,” you would be told that you could only get the “to go” part of your order.
Broad recognition came in 2002, when Calvin Trillin wrote his second piece for The New Yorker, “Don’t Mention It: The hidden life and times of a Greenwich Village restaurant.” Kenny allowed Trillin to use the name and location — which he did not for his 1975 story, “The Bubble Gum Store.” Why the change? Shopsin didn’t own the building the restaurant was in and, NYC real estate being what it was and is, he chose to leave rather than negotiate a new lease.
Kenny knew the gig was up — that the new place would never be the same, so there was no longer a reason to keep it secret.
Shopsin’s has had a number of incarnations over the years and still exists, but the real Shopsin’s lived only in that ancient corner grocery on Bedford and Morton, with Eve, who died in 2002, and Kenny, who passed away in 2018.
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Want to learn more about Kenny Shopsin and the restaurant? Check out the 2004 documentary, I Like Killing Flies.
After the demise of Zaki Kabob House in Albany — the first restaurant in that location to confound its formerly cursed status — came small local chainer Yo Sushi, a casual, order-at-the-front-and-pick-up-your-food-when-it’s ready, brightly-colored and youthful Japanese place focusing on sushi and sashimi, but offering many of the other usual suspects, like tempura and udon.
