Eating - Jason Epstein [33]
EIGHT
WHY THEY ARE CALLED CHOPSTICKS
Some years ago, when I lived the life of a family man in one of those two-story, skylighted ateliers in the genteel bohemia of West Sixty-seventh Street, I dreamed of living one day in the far-west, as yet ungentrified, industrial reaches of Greenwich Village, or on the shabby border of Chinatown, still contained in those years within a few blocks of Chatham Square. I imagined entering through a narrow, dark iron doorway, set in a nondescript façade behind which lay a hidden pleasure dome of Ottoman gardens and splashing fountains. There, under dappled light, I would cook for friends and family and even agreeable strangers, who would come and go as they pleased. I have no idea from what fragments of childhood memory this fantasy of a pleasure dome arose, but the persistence of these buried memories led me to my present address, not far from where SoHo and the touristic remnants of Little Italy converge at the encroaching northern boundary of rapidly expanding Chinatown.
SoHo is the stylish neighborhood south of Houston Street (hence SoHo) of million-dollar lofts carved out of antebellum grand emporiums with their cast-iron façades and bold fenestration. In the 1950s, this vital area was threatened with demolition by an insane scheme to build a multilane highway across lower Manhattan, from the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan Bridge, which would obliterate the thriving neighborhoods between Houston and Canal, including the Italian and Chinese districts, while cutting the island in half at the waist. It was my friend and author the late Jane Jacobs, the savior of cities, who organized the neighborhood to protest this scheme and after a twelve-year struggle prevailed over the highwaymen, developers, and their servile politicians. The result is one of the liveliest, most architecturally distinguished and varied parts of the city: indeed, of any city.
Here, on a typical morning, I walk along Grand Street with my dog, Hamlet, who drags me willingly at the corner of Mott into Di Palo’s sublime cheese shop, a Manhattan landmark and the most illustrious of the few remaining institutions of the old Italian neighborhood, its counters piled high with wheels of Reggiano, Montasio, and Piave, its polyglot customers chatting as they wait their turn. Then, when Hamlet has had his morning snack of pecorino, we dodge Chinese butchers’ boys in long white coats with dressed pigs slung over their shoulders, and forklifts laden with winter melons and crates of bok choy, and cross Grand Street to enter the teeming Chinese market along both sides of Mott between Grand and Hester, the liveliest of several such markets in what has become a vital Chinese city tucked into the city of New York.
I am expecting a guest for lunch and am looking at sea bass displayed in an outdoor stall, atop a bed of crushed ice, their black scales glistening in the pale winter sun. The trawlers must have hit a good school, since all three Mott Street fish markets display these three-pounders in abundance. Prices, as usual, are mysteriously uncoordinated, reflecting the bargains struck earlier this morning at the wholesale market—$3.19, $3.24, $3.20—but will soon be coordinated as the penny-wise shoppers assert their power. At the stall where I usually shop, the bass are marked $3.20. I shop here not because the price is lower by a penny or the quality higher: quality here is policed by the finicky customers and seldom a problem. I shop here because the clerk and I are used to each other. I jabber