In the early 90s a man named Joe Ades began showing up in the bar at the Pierre, Manhattan’s famously posh hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street. Joe liked the crowd at the Café Pierre, but the real draw for him was Kathleen Landis, the dimpled, piano-playing house chanteuse who still entertains there five nights a week. [#image: /photos/54cbfe072cba652122d942bf]Joe was a five-nights-a-week man as well, always seated at the same round table with a front view of the baby grand and a back view of Landis. He drank only champagne, and never alone. His usual brand was Veuve Clicquot. On most nights he casually ordered a bottle, which always appeared with two champagne glasses—one for himself, the other for Landis.

Even by the standards of café society, Joe cut a noticeably soigné figure in his classic, British-made Chester Barrie suits and bold shirts and ties from Turnbull & Asser. The clothes went well with his English accent and late-period Sean Connery salt-and-pepper beard. He looked so distinguished and was so free with the bubbly that the Café Pierre crowd, Landis included, at first had him pegged as one of the “owners”—the tycoons who actually live at the Pierre in stupendously high-end co-op apartments.

The Café Pierre was way off about Joe, or so it decided after some probing. If no one was brave enough to ask him where he lived, quite a few people asked him what he did for a living.

Holding his glass of champagne by the stem, Joe would say simply, “I sell potato peelers.”

The probers had a good chuckle over that. “Right,” they all said. “Now pull the other one.”

While walking the streets in the months that followed, some of the probers, who may have still doubted him, came upon Joe in the middle of a spiel with a crowd gathered around him at some busy corner. He sat on a campstool, peeler in hand, and performed all manner of surgical wonders on carrots, zucchini, and Idaho potatoes. A long slab of Lucite served as his worktable, which rested on storage bins filled with all his produce. The table and his campstool were so low to the ground that he worked from a perpetual crouch, like a catcher. Meanwhile, he kept up a constant patter of inspired stretchers and persiflage belted out at the top of his lungs in a scratchy, theatrical Cockney singsong. After three or four minutes—not before—he announced the price of his “machine,” as he called it, produced a wad of bills from his left coat pocket, and began dealing peelers as fast as he could to the outstretched hands flapping money in his face. As if all this weren’t astonishing enough, he had on his beautiful café attire, only now bits of potato peel flecked his lapels, and sometimes, when he bowed his head low over an operation, sweat from his brow coursed its way down the ridge of his nose and dripped onto the cuffs of his Turnbull & Asser shirt.

Joe is still working the peeler in New York. This past December he turned 72, but unless there’s snow on the ground he’s out pitching.

Joe loves the peeler, which he sells for $5. “I love it for several reasons,” he says. “It’s portable; it works; I never get a complaint. Never ever. When people first see it they don’t believe it. They buy it skeptically, cynically. They can’t believe it’s going to do what I say it’ll do, but they take a chance and they buy it. And during the course of the sale, somebody will walk past—always do—and say, ‘I got one of those. They’re great!’ And it’s true—they’re not shills. You don’t need a shill with something like this.”