Preamble.
In the coldest days at the tail-end of 2008, I published a zine. I made 34 copies — each one was different — and I gave them out to a select few close friends and others as holiday gifts. I’ll never republish it in its entirety. Partly, nothing more than: It’s intensely personal. It’s also my favorite thing I’ve ever made. It’s the thing I’m the most proud of. It’s not that it’s so great. It’s just that it’s just so me.
And I didn’t want anyone to see it. But felt this was worth sharing.
Know this: Shopsin’s is still open in the Essex Street Market. They’re doing takeout (and delivery on Fridays) during the pandemic. Even in a time like this, the modified takeout menu is reliably unhinged and, relative to any other takeout menu you’ve ever read, clinically insane. One of Kenny’s children, his daughter Tamara Shopsin, is a wonderful writer/artist whose work you may have seen. Read one of the very few Kenny-whisperers in food media, the inimitable Calvin Trillin, on Kenny in the New Yorker in 2012. Finally, the cookbook is incredible, and you should own it.
Okay.
From Humble Satellite, No. 24:
5. A Great Case for Being a Piece of Shit
You ever go to Shopsin’s, in the Village, back when it was open there? You had to, right? It was a short-order dinette, just a great spot with this insane, sprawling menu filled with all kinds of weird shit on it, but literally, practically anything you wanted, they may well have had on the menu. And I’m sure you heard about the guy who owned it, Kenny Shopsin, a fabulous human, and also, just an absolute crank to so many of his customers (except kids, who he left giant bowls of candy out for, supposedly as repentance for all the candy he stole growing up in the village as a kid). Kenny should be canonized as a king among the lineage of Great Cantankerous New Yorkers. He was so profoundly combative, intolerant of stupidity, and New Yawk-knife-sharp he could make Fran Lebowitz look like Madeleine Albright. And god, Kenny would kick people out for anything. I always kept my head down in there, and never got his ire, but I know people who tried to befriend him, or tried to order off-menu, and: That’s it, get the fuck out, you’re done here. He loathed press. So many food writers got the boot. He just didn’t have any truck with bullshit people. And of course, it goes without saying, but you always knew the people Kenny liked, because he’d look up and raise his eyebrows at them. An “AY!” and you knew they were friends. And a hug, and you were in the presence of a bona fide Shopsin’s VIP. Or one of his kids. And the people he loved, it was so clear, he loved.
The original Shopsin’s closed; they re-opened as a stand in the Essex Street Market. Kenny died in September. But (in addition to a great cookbook, filled with Kenny’s insane recipes, and wisdom) they made a documentary about him called I Like Killing Flies a while back. It’s great. Worth a watch for the quotables alone. Classic Kenny, for example, talking about someone eating breakfast at Shopsin’s that day:
“Everybody's seven years old. This is a mature person; he has a job, a family, he's going to die some day. He works on Wall Street and he's going to slaughter the Third World Nations today. And he's having chocolate chip pancakes for fuckin' breakfast. Good for him, huh?”
Wonderful, right? But at the end of the movie, Kenny just goes in, and these are the last lines:
“The first duty of everybody in life is to realize that they're a piece of shit. Selfish and self-centered and not very good. You're willing to sacrifice 20 thousand people in another country just so you can go to a Wings concert. (Looks at the director) You sacrifice the lives of a hundred thousand Chinese female babies just so you can rent this fucking camera and do your stupid art project. No problem! (Laughs) You're a piece of shit.
Once you realize you're a piece of shit it's not so hard to take. Because then you don't have this feeling that you're a good person all the time.
And let me tell you something, feeling that you're a good person all the time is like having a brand new car with no scratches on it. It's a real responsibility which is almost impossible to live up to. Being a piece of shit and then occasionally doing something that's good and true is a much easier place to be. I think that's really important and I always try to raise my kids to understand that they're not that terrific. And that not being that terrific, that's okay 'cause most people who say that they're terrific, Bill Clinton, Cardinal Egan, anybody you want to talk about, they're not so terrific. Martha Stewart, they're not so fucking terrific either. And there's nothing wrong with being not-so-terrific. In fact, it's what the whole ballgame is about, being not-so-terrific, and accepting it.”
-f.