Carmellini, however, is a girlie-man fussbudget next to Kenny Shopsin. But then Carmellini is a restaurateur and Shopsin is a diner-eur. His namesake restaurant (now in its third incarnation, in the Essex Street Market) is, despite his loathing of publicity, semifamous in New York for its gargantuan menu and the curmudgeonliness of its owner, who discourses in EAT ME: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin (Knopf, $24.95), a memoir-cum-cookbook written with Carolynn Carreño, on the joy of ejecting customers. Shopsin’s writing is much like his cooking: blunt and flavorful. (“When it comes to food,” he says, “subtlety is lost on me.”) His book is a lot of fun to read, though it’s marred by his constant bragging and his tendency to call anybody who doesn’t do things his way dirty names.
He’s big on how-to, laying out the techniques that enable him to deliver on a menu that at times has contained upward of 900 items. His main trick, though — having everything he needs within reach and everything that takes more than five minutes to prepare pre-made and frozen — won’t be of much use to home cooks. As for complexity, his chicken salad is chicken, mayo, salt and pepper. His egg salad is the same thing, with eggs. I cooked up his recipe for Patsy’s cashew chicken and winced at the acridness of too much soy sauce battling too much lemon. Shopsin’s beanless chili, on the other hand, I’ve got absolutely no complaints about. (He doesn’t explain why half a cup of coffee goes in — you can’t taste it, or at least I couldn’t — but it didn’t keep me up.)
