A restaurant that I would love to emulate

The "beer menu" from Shopsin's. Image from Flickr user pheezy, whose caption is worth quoting: "Hey, don't get huffy-- I asked and got permission to take the photo. (Then I got yelled at while taking the photo. (Then I got backed up from another yell from the other side of the restaurant saying that I'd asked and it was OKAY.))"

If I ever go back to New York City — and I will — I want to go eat at Shopsin’s. It’s a clubby, clique-y kind of place, and it used to be a corner grocery store, and it has something like 900 items on the menu (see it here), except you’re not allowed to copy what your neighbour ordered.

I just read a great — and apparently famous — profile from 2002 in the New Yorker. It makes me wish that there was a place as idiosyncratic within eating distance of my home:

One evening, when the place was nearly full, I saw a party of four come in the door; a couple of them may have been wearing neckties, which wouldn’t have been a plus in a restaurant whose waitress used to wear a T-shirt that said “Die Yuppie Scum.” Kenny took a quick glance from the kitchen and said, “No, we’re closed.” After a brief try at appealing the decision, the party left, and the waitress pulled the security gate partway down to discourage other latecomers.

”It’s only eight o’clock,” I said to Kenny.

”They were nothing but strangers,” he said.

”I think those are usually called customers,” I said. “They come here, you give them food, they give you money. It’s known as the restaurant business.”

Kenny shrugged. “Fuck ‘em,” he said.

Read a sample recipe after the jump.

To get an idea of Kenny’s methods, I once asked him how he made one of Eve’s favorites, Chicken Tortilla Avocado Soup, which he describes as a simple soup. “When someone orders that, I put a pan up with oil in it,” he said. “Not olive oil; I use, like, a Wesson oil. And I leave it. I’ve drilled out the holes in the burner so . . . it’s really fucking hot. . . . On the back burner, behind where that pan is, I have that grid. I just take a piece of chicken breast and throw it on. The grid is red hot, flames shooting up, and the chicken sears with black marks immediately and starts to cook. If there were grits or barley or something, I would nuke ‘em. . . . At that point in the cook, that’s what would happen if this were Chicken Tortilla Avocado with barley in it. For this dish—this is a fast dish—I shred cabbage with my knife. Green cabbage. . . . I cut off a chunk and I chop it really finely into long, thin shreds. I do the same with a piece of onion. Same with fresh cilantro. At this point, José has turned the chicken while my back is still to the pan. I throw the shit into the oil, and if you rhythm it properly, by the time you have the onions and everything cut, the oil is just below smoke. Smoke for that oil is about three-eighty-five. After three-eighty-five, you might as well throw it out. It won’t fry anymore; it’s dead. But I turn around just before smoke and I throw this shit in. And what happens is the cabbage hits it and almost deep-fries—it browns—and now we get a really nice cabbage, Russian-type flavor. The onions soften immediately, and I now turn back and I take one of any number of ingredients, depending on what they’ve ordered, and in this particular instance, for someone like you, I would add crushed-up marinated jalapeño peppers to about a five, which is about a half a tablespoon. They’re in a little cup in front of me. . . . In front of me, in, like, a desk in-out basket, I have two levels of vegetables that don’t need to be refrigerated and I have plastic cups full of garlic or whatever. So now the soup is cooking. So then I reach under the refrigerator. On the refrigerator floor there’s another thirty or forty ingredients, and I’ll take for this particular soup hominy—canned yellow hominy—and throw in a handful of that. Then I go to the steam table and take from the vegetarian black-bean soup—it has a slotted spoon in it—a half spoon of vegetarian cooked black beans. And then I switch to the right, because the spice rack is there, and I put in a little cumin. Then I take the whole thing and I pour chicken stock in it from the steam table. And at this point José has already taken the chicken off the flame. The chicken now is marked on the outside and the outside is white, but it’s not cooked. It’s pink in the center. He cuts it into strips, we throw it into the soup, a cover goes on the soup, it gets moved over to the left side of the stove on a lower light and in about three minutes José takes a bowl, puts some tortilla chips that I’ve fried the day before in the bowl with some sliced avocado and then pours the soup over it. And that’s Chicken Tortilla Avocado Soup.” There are about two hundred other soups.