Kenny Shopsin, whose "my way or the highway because I will throw you out" approach to serving customers made him a lovable if extremely grumpy figure in the NYC food world, passed away over the Labor Day weekend. His daughter Tamara Shopsin said on Instagram that the Essex Street Market location would be open on Wednesday: "My dad won’t be there in body but he will be there. I love you dad."

Shopin opened his diner, Shopsin's (or Shopsin's General Store), in Greenwich Village in 1982 (it was originally a general store that he and his wife bought in 1973). Calvin Trillin wrote in the New Yorker in 2002:

Because Shopsin's has a number of rules and because Kenny is, by his own admission, "not a patient person," it's common to run into people who are afraid to enter the place. I've escorted a number of them to their first Shopsin's meal, in the way a longtime businessman in a Midwestern town might escort a newcomer to Kiwanis at noon on Wednesday. Since the "Seinfeld" Soup Nazi episode became part of the culture, people sometimes compare Kenny to the brilliant but rule-obsessed soup purveyor who terrified Jerry Seinfeld and his friends. Kenny would say that one difference between him and the Soup Nazi is that the Soup Nazi is shown ladling out his soup from a steam table; at Shopsin's, most soups are made from scratch when they're ordered. Some people think of Shopsin's as forbiddingly clubby, chilly to outsiders. Actually, Shopsin's does not have a crowd, in the sense of a group of people who go in assuming they'll run into someone they know—the way the old Lion's Head, a few blocks uptown, had a crowd, built around Village Voice writers. At a play reading once, I was surprised to run into a Shopsin's regular I hadn't realized was an actor; all I'd known about him was that he doted on a dish called Turkey Spinach Cashew Brown Rice Burrito. Still, there are a lot of regulars, and they seem more at home than they might at a conventional restaurant. "You're really not allowed to be anonymous here," Kenny has said. "You have to be willing to be who you really are. And that scares a lot of people."

Trillin also witnessed Shopsin tell a party of four, which had two men in neckties, that the restaurant was closed (when it wasn't yet); Shopsin explained his decision thusly, "Fuck 'em."

The Village location closed in 2006 and reopened at the Essex Street Market, with its infamous menu of hundreds of items:

Kenny Shopsin has died. The man knew how to make a menu pic.twitter.com/9KASA772Dq — Rhett Jones (@rhettjonez) September 3, 2018

"Shopsin's daughter, Tamara, once admitted that the worst thing she had ever done was teach her father how to use Adobe InDesign. She didn't expect him to exploit the text-squeeze function to such an extent," Saveur reported in 2009.

Grub Street explained why he needed to squeeze so much text into two sides of a menu, "The actual menu at Shopsin’s was, like Shopsin himself, quirky to the extreme and inscrutably vast. The number of dishes on the downtown restaurant’s legendarily voluminous menu reached Himalayan heights of, at one point, 900 items. There are standards like the famous mac-and-cheese pancakes; numerous varieties of egg sandwiches (scrapple, anyone?), and loose interpretations of other cuisines’ dishes. Sometimes entirely imagined, as in the invented country of Indomalekia. Many are (not infrequently kooky) creations rooted in no traditions but Shopsin’s — taco fried eggs? Cheeseburger soup? — but one of his best-regarded dishes is nothing more than scrambled eggs and toast. Shopsin liked to make them with clarified butter, and was not shy about describing them as 'perfect.'"

Shopsin also wrote a book, with Carolynn Carreno, Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin, with tidbits like, "Pancakes are a luxury, like smoking marijuana or having sex. That’s why I came up with the names Ho Cakes and Slutty Cakes. These are extra decadent, but in a way, every pancake is a Ho Cake." Here he is, making his mac and cheese pancakes for the NY Times:

He was also the subject of a documentary, I Like Killing Flies, which Variety called an "affectionate portrait of Kenny, his brood and his singular worldview as the profanity-prone chef expounds on life, death, sex, terrorism, waste disposal and insect extermination."

Shopsin's author bio read as, "Kenny Shopsin is a self-taught chef who has developed his own inimitable style: he colors outside of the lines and then uses the crayons in his pancakes. He lives in Greenwich Village."

I loved Kenny Shopsin. He/Eve fed me for free when I was broke. Like everyone, our friendship was based on profane barbs flung back & forth at each other. The magic of Bedford St has so many memories. I’ve more to say, but for now- #AllOurCooksWearCondoms #RIPkennyShopsin #EatMe — Lizz “Pecker Watcher " Winstead (@lizzwinstead) September 3, 2018