Don't mention it: the hidden life and times of a Greenwich Village restaurant.(Shopsin's General Store)

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 cafe. 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 decor." Eve expressed outrage, not simply at the existence of the review but also at its content. "Do you call this 'no decor'?" 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.

I looked around. Shopsin's still looks a lot like a corner store. It has an old pressed-tin ceiling. There are shelves, left over from the grocery store, that are always piled high and not terribly neatly with ingredients and supplies. There are always newspapers and magazines around for the customer who might need reading material while eating alone. A table setup might include a constantly varying assortment of toys and puzzles -- a custom that started when the Shopsins' children were young and continues for the more or less grownup customers. The counter, which no longer has stools, is taken up mainly by buckets of complimentary penny candy. One wall has, in addition to a three-dimensional advertisement for Oscar Mayer beef franks, some paintings of the place and its denizens. The portrait of Kenny shows him as a bushy-haired man with a baby face that makes him look younger than he is, which is nearly sixty, and a girth that may reflect years of tasting his more remarkable creations; he's wearing a Shopsin's General Store T-shirt, folded over in the way the cognoscenti know how to fold it in order to form the words "Eat Me." A large sign behind the tiny kitchen that Kenny shares with his longtime assistant, Jose, says "All Our Cooks Wear Condoms." When I had taken in all of that, or whatever part of it was there at the time, I said, "I absolutely agree, Eve. A reviewer might comment on whether or not the decor is to his taste. Conceivably, he could prefer another type of decor. But you can't say that this place has no decor."

Normally, mentions of Shopsin's in print are complimentary, in a sort of left-handed way -- as in Time Out New York's most recent guide to the city's restaurants, which raved about the soups and described Kenny ("the foul-mouthed middle-aged chef and owner") as "a culinary genius, if for no other reason than he figured out how to fit all his ingredients into such a tiny ...