Kenny Shopsin, the colorful proprietor of a fabled Manhattan restaurant where the menu is vast and the customer has never been king, died on Sunday at his home in the West Village. He was 76.

His son-in-law Andrew Lampert said he had fallen last year and had had a series of health problems since.

Mr. Shopsin and his wife, Eve, started their restaurant, Shopsin’s General Store, in 1983 in a grocery they had been running on Bedford Street in the West Village. It has moved several times since and is now on the Lower East Side. But wherever it has been it has reflected the curmudgeonly, curse-word-employing personality of Mr. Shopsin, a man who was rarely written about without having the word “eccentric” appended to his name.

Not that he was written about that often. Mr. Shopsin didn’t like publicity or being listed in diners’ guides because, he said, such attention had the annoying effect of attracting customers. His was a classic neighborhood restaurant, and he didn’t want it to become a tourist attraction. He was not averse to throwing someone out who didn’t seem to get the chatty, casual-clutter look and feel of the place.