A Feast for the Senses

A Feast for the Senses

‘Mumbai New York Scranton,’ by Tamara Shopsin

I’ve managed to eat at Kenny Shopsin’s legendary restaurant and ­customer-hazing clinic only once, thanks to a regular who had passed muster and brought me along to breakfast. This was when Shopsin’s was still in Greenwich Village and felt like a crazed version of the general store it had once been; over the stack of plain pancakes that I ordered without knowing any better, I tried not to be too alarmed by the abusive banter in the kitchen between Shopsin and one of his sons â€" which sounded, to the uninitiated, like a job for 911. Could I call social services, I wondered, and still come back for more pancakes

Tamara Shopsin

MUMBAI NEW YORK SCRANTON

By Tamara Shopsin

Photographs by Jason Fulford

276 pp. Scribner. $25.

I did try going back to Shopsin’s a few times after that first visit, but I never made it past the door again. (It hurt more than being turned away from a restaurant should.) “Until I know the people,” Shopsin explains in “Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin,” a cookbook designed by his daughter Tamara and photographed by her husband, Jason Fulford, “until they show me that they are worth cultivating as customers, I’m not even sure I want their patronage.” In a city where it’s possible to bluff or buy your way into almost anything, Shopsin’s has turned snobbery on its head by remaking the diner into a private club for a membership of the cook’s choosing.

Luckily for the rest of us, Tamara Shopsin, a graphic designer and illustrator whose work has appeared in the pages of the Book Review, has a much more egalitarianrelationship with her public. Her new memoir, “Mumbai New York Scranton,” with illustrations by the author and photographs, once again, by Fulford, throws the doors open on her father’s restaurant (where she still works on Saturdays, cracking “unholy amounts of eggs” for brunch); brings the reader on a pilgrimage, through the crumbling museums and time-warped hotels of India and back again to the delis of Brooklyn and the supermarkets of Scranton, Pa., where the couple have a house; and most arrestingly of all, takes us inside the studio for a peek at her creative process. Oh, and there’s the small matter of the sudden diagnosis of a brain tumor, a hemangioblastoma that explains why Shopsin can’t balance on her bicycle anymore or keep down any of her food. Some memoirs are about travel. Others are about surviving a bigger-than-life faily. Many of them are about illness, and the rare memoir gives readers a private glimpse of a marriage that’s also a creative partnership. Just like one of the fabled items from her father’s menu (look up “mac ’n’ cheese pancakes” online some time), Shopsin’s memoir does them all.

Mumbai is the first stop on the book’s itinerary. After reuniting with her husband at the airport at 1 a.m. â€" “There are 100 unlicensed cabdrivers waiting for Jason and me to finish kissing” â€" Shopsin lets us tag along on the couple’s wide-eyed crossing of southern India, which is different from the spiritual journeys we’ve come to expect. “I’ve heard about Americans who go to India and flip out,” Shopsin writes. “They give away all they have with them, take out the max from the A.T.M., and return home changed forever.” Not these two pilgrims, who have come to India in search of visual artifacts, hoping to fill rolls of film (Fulford) and notebooks (Shopsin) with the pieces of found art that are scattered all around them. Wrestling with the scarf from her shalwar kameez, which keeps dragging on the ground, Shopsin is far too practical to suffer for the sake of authenticity. She asks her husband “if we can buy some safety pins or Velcro. He says that is cheating.”

As winning as Shopsin’s voice is, it’s her formal strategy for the book that makes the India section more than just an illustrated travelogue. Her spare, present-tense narration is interspersed with her drawings â€" my favorite is a typewriter with a comically elongated roller for extra-wide documents, a loving ode to obsolescence â€" and Fulford’s eerily composed black-and-white photographs, which sometimes depict the thing described but more often don’t, building a larger world through association. In Mysore, as their trip winds down, the couple follow a crowd into an auditorium one night and end up watching a talent show put on by schoolchildren. Shopsin catalogs the acts in vivid detail, while Fulford’s picture is more interested in the crowd; the men, straining to see the stage from the highest seats, are our stand-ins, and the page becomes a mirror in which the reader is transformed. Text and image work together in a marriage of complements. Reading the memoir feels like eavesdropping on Shopin and Fulford as they collaborate.

There are threads introduced in the “Mumbai” section that weave their way through the rest of the book and unify the whole. Shopsin and Fulford are both deadline artists, taking on freelance jobs for different publications, and the rhythm of the work is a constant. Shopsin takes us through the process of dreaming up an “illo” (shorthand for illustration) from the time she gets an assignment to the moment she presses “send” and delivers it, showing us how an artist carries her work with her no matter where she is and what else threatens to intrude. If you’ve ever wanted to share the elation of constructing a pyramid of chocolate doughnut holes, photographing them to look like cannonballs, and then having an editor sign off on the resulting work, then this is the book for you. Shopsin also revisits a short highlight reel of her illustration work for The New York Times, including a “tunnel of lard” that she sutured by hand to give it structural integrity.

The restaurant is a touchstone too, and some of Shopsin’s finest writing is devoted to her growing up in what the family called “the Store”: getting rides home on the back of her father’s motorcycle wearing a salad bowl duct-taped to a sweatband to comply with helmet laws; running wild in a New Jersey supermarket with her brothers and twin sister while her parents bought the week’s supplies. (“Will the parents of the lost boy with the cape please report to the courtesy counter,” one typical P.A. announcement went.) When Shopsin returns from India and isn’t feeling up to her usual weekend shift in the kitchen, that’s the first sign she might be suffering from something more serious than a traveler’s bug. Still, she is a Shopsin, so even after a mass has been discovered on her brain stem and she’s being rushed into Manhattan for an emergency M.R.I., she has the wherewithal to let loose a mini-diatribe:

“We pass a sign that says ‘Triborough Bridge Renamed R.F.K. Bridge.’ I freak out. Why would the city rename a bridge everyone knows The name isn’t even debatably offensive, like the Tomahawk Chop. Unless the city now finds logic ­offensive.”

It’s almost enough to make a customer forgive the sting of getting turned away from Shopsin’s. Almost. If she writes another book as enjoyable as this one, then I’ll think about it.

Benjamin Anastas’s memoir, “Too Good to Be True,” was published in October.

A version of this review appeared in print on March 24, 2013, on page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: A Feast for the Senses.