About 20 years ago, I was working as the book buyer for Dean & Deluca–a job that introduced me figuratively and often literally to writers who would rock my gastro-literary world: Edna Lewis, Laurie Colwin, Paula Wolfert, MFK Fisher, Joyce Chen, Jane Grigson, Alice Waters, Peter Hoffman, Elizabeth David, Colman Andrews, and so many others crossed our threshold (sometimes in book form) on a regular basis and wound up being unwitting fixtures in my life. So when it was suggested to me by one of them that I should go to cooking school, I went. Being in my twenties and having to pay the rent on my fifth floor walk-up, I had the energy to stand on my feet at the store for ten hours a day, six days a week, and attend school at night. It was glorious; it was energizing. But, I was also throwing darts at a wall, not ever knowing what would stick, or what I would do after I finished the program I was in. And when an offer was presented to me to work on the line at the now-defunct Manhattan restaurant, Eze, I got spooked: I rationalized that the hours were too long, I’d blown my knees out skiing, and I wanted, ultimately, to cook for my friends and family. I did not, however, want to create oversized plates of vertical food that you’d need a degree in deconstructive architecture in order to eat.
So I turned the job down. I left Dean & Deluca. I went back to my job as an editor and pulled the culinary covers over my head. And I will always regret it. Today, if I had to do all over again and I lived where I do now–in a cool, smallish Connecticut town–I’d go it alone and grab my dream no matter what anyone said: I’d open a laid back place that served international breakfast food all day, its menu organized by country and written every morning on wall-hung chalkboards: Pho. Congee. Kachori. Miso soup. Ham and red eye gravy. Shrimp and grits. Bagels and lox. Kippers and eggs. Kedgeree. Cafe au lait and a tartine. Arepas. Menudo. Chocolate con churros. The stuff that real people eat in the morning, wherever they live, and whoever they are. (In other words, f**k all of the mimosas and breakfast buffets out there, thank you very much.)
Woulda, coulda, shoulda, says
Susan Feniger, ten years my senior, and about to launch what is, to my mind, one of the best restaurant concepts going in this crazy scary economic environment. Or, frankly, any environment.
In a
March 11th LA Times article, Feniger–one of the Food Network’s first celebrity chefs, and one half (with Mary Sue Miliken) of Too Hot Tamales–told reporter Rene Lynch, “The choice was to be on my deathbed, saying ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda,’ and I just said, ‘What am I scared of?’ and I realized I needed to do this.”
This is
Street, Feniger’s paean to international street food in all of its forms and manifestations. Why is she doing this, at a time when fewer people are dining out, and when they are, they’re not necessarily wanting to experiment on Mumbai street snacks like
pani puri (crispy fried rounds stuffed traditionally with a tamarind chile mixture and meant to be eaten in one bite)? Because, she says, this kind of food is “relevant and equalizing.”
“I’m way more drawn to this idea, conceptually, that you have people from all walks of life who are enjoying the same exact thing. There’s something to seeing someone with no money enjoying the same exact thing as someone with a bunch of money.”
Naturally, I like this idea very much, in the same way that I like standing by the window at
Gray’s Papaya on West 72nd Street in Manhattan at 8 am on a weekday morning, eating the city’s finest cheap hot dog next to a Brooks Brothers-clad attorney sheepishly trying to scrape mustard off his Hermes tie before his 9 am deposition. Same idea.
Never mind what Macaulay Conor said in A Philadelphia Story: it’s street food that’s the great leveler, not alcohol. It’s an open window into the soul of an urban culinary culture, be it in Baghdad, Beirut, or Brooklyn. And it took someone as gutsy, smart, and sensitive as Susan Feniger to pull it off in a city that’s prone to focus on trend first, and the actual food, second. Will she succeed? My prediction is yes. At a time when people have grown weary and wary of inauthenticity in all its forms, she’s doing the right thing, following her heart, and cooking with soul. What could be more delicious, or real, than that?
As for me, my international breakfast joint will remain just a good idea that, if I’d had any cahones, I’d have launched 20 years ago. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. For now, I’ll just have to settle for Street, and live vicariously. And that’s just fine by me.
