Shopsin's moving to Brooklyn

How's this for a menu design?

That's just half a page of the 6-pages menu of Shopsin's, my favorite eatery in New York, in the West Village. Well, not for long: According to this week's New York magazine, Shopsin's will be moving to Brooklyn soon.

What makes Shopsin's so great? The food, of course, which is really good - and that several-thousands-items menu (get it in full, it's a piece of art, of unadulterated poetry - PDF, 156 Kb - they used to have a 10-pages version - PDF, 484 Kb), which leaves you generally incapable of deciding what to order. It is the result of a somewhat randomly creative process:

"I think I have everything all the time," Kenny says. "That's part of the system." What does happen occasionally is that Kenny gets an idea for a dish and writes on the specials board— yes, there is a specials board—something like Indomalekian Sunrise Stew. (Kenny and his oldest son, Charlie, invented the country of Indomalekia along with its culinary traditions.) A couple of weeks later, someone finally orders Indomalekian Sunrise Stew and Kenny can't remember what he had in mind when he thought it up. Fortunately, the customer doesn't know, either, so Kenny just invents it again on the spot.

That's from a 2002 story by Calvin Trillin for the New Yorker that basically outed Shopsin's (it's a great article in its own right, worth reading). Eccentric owner Kenny Shopsin and his family have turned a spartan restaurant into a sort of a cult-ish best-kept-secret kind of place (Kenny hates publicity and never talks to journalists, Trillin excepted - when he gets phone calls from guidebook editors he is said to say that the place is no longer in operation). Strict rules are enforced at Shopsin's: no cell phone use (nothing too original), no smoking (kind of avant-garde, when one comes from Europe), everyone's got to eat (that requires some commitment), no two people at the same table can eat the same dish (you better pick first), and no parties larger than four: that's a principle explained on the menu by a Robert Hershon poem, "Party of five"  - if you can find it (it's on the last page):

You could put a chair at the end
or push the tables together
but dont bother
This banged-up little restaurant
where you would expect no rules at all
has a firm policy against seating
parties of five
And you know you are a party of five
It doesn't matter if one of you
offers to leave or if
you say you could split into
a party of three and a party of two
or if the five of you come back tomorrow
in Richard Nixon masks and try to pretend
that you don't know each other
It won't work: You're a party of five
even if you're a beloved regular
Even if the place is empty
Even if you bring logic to bear
Even if you're a tackle for the Chicago Bears
it won't work
You're a party of five
You will always be a party of five
A hundred blocks from here
a hundred years from now
you will still be a party of five
and you will never savor the soup
or compare the coffee
or hear the wisdom of the cook
and the wit of the waitress or
get to hum the old -time tunes
among which you will find
no quintets

The F train goes to Brooklyn.

UPDATE 7 May 06 - Or maybe not. According to today's New York Times, that New York magazine piece got it wrong, and in mentioning their article I just prolonged the rumor: Shopsin's not moving after all. Because of this post, NYT author Kayleen Schaefer contacted me (she did not quote our discussion in her article) saying that the rumor "created panicked customers". Which is in itself a statement of the cult-ish status achieved, in their insane genius, by Kenny Shopsin and his family.