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Dim sum with Bud
By MARGO HAMMOND, Times Books Editor
NEW YORK -- A food outing with Calvin Trillin, the man who writes mouthwatering articles for the New Yorker, had been a fantasy of mine ever since I heard him on the Tonight Show describing taking out-of-town guests to Chinatown to eat dim sum and play tic-tac-toe with a chicken. So when the New Yorker this fall, as part of its second annual festival celebrating the magazine, offered an off-the-eaten-path tour with the author of The Tummy Trilogy, I signed on. The Come Hungry tour promised a walk through Greenwich Village, SoHo and Little Italy (with snacks along the way) and a dim sum brunch in Chinatown. Alas, the tic-tac-toe-playing chicken was no longer available. The group gathered on a Sunday morning in the Village in front of Our Lady of Pompei Church on Carmine at Bleeker, just around the corner from where Trillin raised his two daughters and still lives. When Calvin -- his friends call him "Bud" -- arrived, we immediately headed for Home. That's a restaurant on nearby Cornelia Street whose sign looks like a little kid's drawing of a house but whose menu is decidedly more expensive than mom's. Thirty years ago or so, this corner of the Village was dotted with bakeries and butcher shops, frequented by Italian immigrants who lived above them in small apartments with bathtubs in their kitchens and no ovens, Trillin explained. Now in place of Zito's bakery is the Cornelia Street Cafe, a place that offers "poetry readings on high stools," he added in his characteristic deadpan delivery. Home, whose walls are plastered with family photographs of owners David and Barbara Page, who, like Trillin, are Midwesterners, serves up food that has been described as "trendy fusion." "This is an unusually upscale stop for me," Trillin apologized, as we wolfed down samples of salami served with Wisconsin cheese. He praised the place, however, for its homegrown ingredients: Not only was the salami we were eating homemade, but David Page also makes his own ketchup ("It's not as sweet as Heinz," Trillin pointed out). A more Trillinesque stop would have been Joe's Cheese Shop, but, alas, it isn't open on Sundays. Trillin took us by there anyway, crossing Houston, once the demarcation line between the Italians and the Irish, to Sullivan Street, where I pondered the rather redundant words on the cheese shop's window: cheese, spaghetti and mozzarelle. "This used to be the only place where you could buy pasta; now drugstores stock it," said Trillin, looking wistful in his baseball cap with its Missouri Historical Society logo. Up Sullivan (a SoHo-encroached street that is being invaded by shops selling Depression glass, complained Trillin), we passed Once Upon a Tart (despite its name, it's a decent French bakery, Trillin told us) and then turned east on Prince Street, heading deep into SoHo, with its classic buildings of cast iron, huge windows and lots of light. Artists, who needed space, were the first to invade this warehouse district. The restaurants (the first, appropriately, was called Food, or was it Eat?) and galleries followed. Now, said Trillin, it's the "center of home decorating stores." We hustled along, crossing Broadway, passing Dean & Deluca's (the gourmet food emporium, a pioneer in SoHo, has two locations there these days), heading for Little Italy. Worrying that we might weary before reaching our dim sum goal, Trillin had arranged for a Chinese vendor to meet us at Crosby and Spring with another snack. On cue, the vendor, who had come from East Broadway and Forsythe, arrived with sandwiches filled with a mysterious green vegetable in a bun that Trillin describes as the kind "that foreign devils use." "What's the green substance?" someone asked. "I don't want to know," said Trillin. To a food lover, any new food is an adventure, he explained. He often tries things just by ordering "that thing in the window." What could be worse, he pointed out, than double boiled deer penis, a dish he was actually served in Hong Kong, though it wasn't clear if he actually ate it. Crossing Mulberry and turning down Mott Street, we were finally in the heart of Little Italy, where the last booths of the annual San Gennaro festival were being dismantled. The district, said Trillin, is less Italian than it once was. "The Italians have all moved to Staten Island," he said. Still, a few shops and restaurants have remained, catering mainly to tourists (and to Italians from the 'burbs who come in for their weekly supplies). Trillin ticked off his favorites: the Parisi Bakery on Mott, famous for its prosciutto bread; Alleva, which has been manufacturing cheese since 1897, on Grand Street; and Di Palo's, a cheese shop touting Fine Imported Italian Cheese. We stopped at the latter at Grand and Mott and indulged in a juicy slice of soft, fleshy mozzarella, just made. Is Trillin bothered by all these neighborhood changes? Not at all. "The 1965 immigration act let in more English than wanted to come and brought in more Chinese people as the Italians moved to Staten Island," he said, but as a tried and true foodie, he couldn't be happier. More Chinese has meant more interesting food. As we negotiated the crowded sidewalks of Chinatown (Smithfield hams and fish are cheaper here, Trillin told us), we passed some of that interesting food: stalls piled high with snake skins, giant ginger roots and dried fish. The dim sum restaurant, upstairs in an enormous shopping arcade at 88 E Broadway at Market, was our last stop. The waiters at Triple Eight Palace grinned at Trillin, obviously a regular, and led us to three round tables that soon were laden with choi dumplings ("My daughters call them hockey pucks," said Trillin), taro cakes, greens that looked suspiciously like those in the "buns that foreign devils use" and shrimp dumplings. During our Chinese feast, Trillin moved among the three tables of tour participants, most of whom were die-hard fans. One middle-aged woman asked him to retell the story of the now-retired tic-tac-toe chicken. Warming up to the task, Trillin explained that, inevitably, when his out-of-town guests would lose out to the chicken, they would complain that the chicken got to go first. "But he's a chicken," Trillin would tell them. "Surely, as a human, you had some advantage." As usual the story was a hit, but I noticed a trace of added sadness in Trillin's already hang-dog look. Perhaps talking about eating out reminded him of his wife, Alice, of Let's Eat, Alice fame, whom he recently lost to cancer. A staff writer for the New Yorker since 1963, and now also a columnist for Time magazine, Trillin is often associated with food, but he isn't just a food writer. He has written books about raising children (Family Man), his Jewish father's common sense (Messages From My Father) and the suicide of a childhood friend (Remembering Denny). In his rhymed couplets in the Nation, he touches upon a whole gamut of serious topics, from the war in Iraq to the Enron scandal. No one at the Triple Eight Palace, however, asked him about Saddam Hussein. Instead, a dark-haired young woman drilled Trillin about bialys, the chewy, round yeast rolls of Jewish-American origin. "It's a quick jump to a bad bialy," he warned her. When the waves of oncoming food finally ceased and when the tables took on the look of the day after a pitched battle, we all got up, with great effort. I turned to thank Trillin for his tour when an ample woman at the next table came up with a perfect description of our food guide: "He's an Everyman -- whatever that means." The woman, it turned out, was Trillin's older sister, Soukey. She and "Buddy," as she calls him, grew up in Kansas City, Mo. Their father was a grocer, their mother a bad cook. Looking at Soukey, I can't help but think of one of her brother's most famous quotes: "The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found." A few days after the Come Hungry tour, I spotted a headline in the latest New York Observer: "Eat! It's Tubby Town." Illustrated with a drawing of chubby New Yorkers Rosie O'Donnell, Alec Baldwin, David Wells and James Gandolfini, the article proclaimed, "The steely, anorexic ambition that consumed this city for the better part of the last century is taking a snack break. . . . Take a look around: New York is fat as a house, and enjoying it." Thanks to Bud (after our eating adventure together, I feel I have the right to call him that now), I was, too. If you goThe 2003 New Yorker Festival will take place Sept. 19-21. To sign up for advance notice of the event's activities, go to www.newyorkerreaderlink.com and click on "events."
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From the Times Taste section From the features wire |
