NYC: Your pizza will be made by a Tibetian, and your sushi made by a Mexican

The ultimate in mix-and-match!

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/ny...pagewanted=all

NY Times
July 31, 2005
The Pizza's Still Old World, Only Now the Old World's Tibet
By JOSEPH BERGER

What do you say to the sushi chef who has just served you the most sublime yellowtail?

Often these days, it is "Gracias." New tides of immigration have so transformed New York City that classic ethnic foods and drinks are increasingly being prepared by people whose ethnicity does not necessarily match the menu's.

Exhibit A: the egg cream. For New Yorkers of a certain age, this was the nectar of a Jewish neighborhood, and Gem Spa was the drink's sacred temple, certified as such by magazines and travel writers. Gem Spa is still there, still turning out egg creams at its narrow patch of a soda fountain in the East Village. But the person who owns the store and taught the staff to make this curious concoction of seltzer, milk and chocolate syrup is Ray Patel, a 62-year-old immigrant from Gujarat state in India.

He learned the recipe, including the secret stirring motions that create a frothy head resembling beaten egg whites, from the previous owner (Italian), who learned it from the old owner (Jewish).

"People try to learn new things in a land of opportunity," is Mr. Patel's elegant explanation for how an Indian came to make a drink that is considered exotic west of the Hudson River, let alone in Gujarat.

The changing of the food guard has been so gradual that New Yorkers often don't notice that the falafel at their favorite stand has been whipped up by someone from Latin America.

But some of the changes have been striking.

The pastry chef at Brasserie La Côte Basque on West 55th Street is Ecuadorean. The pizza maker at Totonno's on Second Avenue and 80th Street is Tibetan. And one of the sushi chefs at Hatsuhana on East 48th Street, among the pioneers in initiating the city into the delights of raw fish, is Mexican.

The main reason for this phenomenon - one observed across a nation being reshaped by newcomers - is that the old immigrant pipeline is drying up. The Italians, Irish, Jews and French who once made their fortunes standing over steaming pots of spaghetti or slicing endless slivers of paper-thin Nova Scotia smoked salmon sent their children to graduate schools to become lawyers and doctors. Keita Sato, the president of Hatsuhana, who grew up on Long Island and was trained in the delicate art of sushi by his father, said that his Japanese-American friends preferred to become stockbrokers.

"The younger generation, it's not their No. 1 priority to be a sushi chef," said Mr. Sato.

But somebody has to layer the moussaka and coddle the crepes and, increasingly, those willing to put in the long sweaty hours are newcomers from Latin America and Asia. A study by Dr. Andrew A. Beveridge, a professor of sociology at Queens College, showed that the number of New York food service workers from South and Central America and the West Indies jumped to 54,105 in 2000 from 31,214 in 1990, and the number of Asian workers increased to 34,393 from 25,358, according to his analysis of census figures. By contrast, the proportion of native-born workers in food service dropped to 36.2 percent in 2000 from 55.3 percent in 1980. "When the supply of your fellow ethnics isn't available to staff the place, you turn to the newest group on the block," said Joel Denker, author of "The World on a Plate: A Tour Through the History of America's Ethnic Cuisine" (Westview Press, 2003).

Right now, according to Ed Levine, a food writer in New York, "The work force in the food world is comprised primarily of Latinos." That explains why one of the best-selling books at Kitchen Arts & Letters at Lexington Avenue and 93d Street is "Kitchen Spanish" by Michael A. Friend and T. J. Loughran.

While the new immigrant workers may start out behind the scenes as busboys and dishwashers, many rise to positions as chefs or counter people who master not just the art of preparing other cultures' foods but also the whole accompanying cultural repertoire. Kenny Sze, an immigrant from Hong Kong who started out in the 1970's as a teenager at Zabar's and trained to fillet herrings under the legendary Sam Cohen, owns Sable's Smoked Fish on Second Avenue and 78th Street. It claims it carries "the world's best smoked salmon, sturgeon and caviar." His shop provided 35 pounds of caviar for the recent wedding of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's daughter Emma.

He has learned not only how to pick out a slab of nova before dawn at the right smokehouse, but also how to speak the smattering of Yiddish needed to kibitz with customers like former Mayor Edward I. Koch, for whom the patter is as important as the platter. In an interview, Mr. Koch exulted in the way Mr. Sze sometimes wraps lobster salad in a slice of sturgeon, and admitted that although "it may not be Jewish, it's haute cuisine." Over all, he said, he appreciates the diversity in the city's ethnic kitchens.

"It adds an exoticism to it and increases my appetite," he said.

Some ethnicities appropriate the food of other cultures that history had forced them to become familiar with. Albanians run many Italian restaurants, and Bangladeshis operate many of the Indian restaurants in the strip along East 6th Street. Some immigrants seize on an unfilled niche - as the Greeks did decades ago when they recast the American diner or the Cambodians who run numerous doughnut shops in Southern California.

Armando Martinez came to the United States in 1994 from the Mexican city of Puebla. One of his first jobs was as an all-purpose kitchen worker at a Japanese restaurant near Columbia University. He enjoyed the precision of boning fish and rolling rice so much that he moved up two years later to Hatsuhana, where the fish is flown in from Japan and where the care taken with sushi is on a far more demanding level. (It tries to observe the Japanese tradition that sushi preparation requires four years of priestlike training.)

Mr. Martinez, who lives in Astoria, Queens, with his wife and 19-month-old twins, worked his way up a year and a half ago to the sushi counter, where he and the other eight chefs pare off wedges of salmon and yellowtail and press them on beds of warm rice. A slender, genial man who was wearing a Yankees cap during a break, Mr. Martinez spoke of his love for the craft. "I like to see a satisfied customer," he said. "To do that, it takes a lot of work."

Mr. Sato is happy to have Mr. Martinez, since he says it is not easy to find skilled Japanese chefs. "In the kitchen when we are right beside each other preparing the fish and rice, he puts me to shame," he said. "He's better than most Japanese chefs."

Totonno's, which was established in 1924 in Coney Island and claims to be the "oldest continuously operating pizzeria in the U.S. run by the same family," has four locations but it despaired of filling them with Italian pizziolas, or pizza makers, and was not about to take just anybody.

"You have to have a feel for the dough," said Louise Ciminieri, granddaughter of the founder.

Phuntsok Tashi came along just in time. Mr. Tashi, who is of Tibetan ancestry, immigrated five years ago from Dalhousie, India, in the western Himalayas, which has a large Tibetan community. A sister worked in a restaurant on Second Avenue and told him Totonno's, a few doors down, needed a busboy. Soon Brooklyn-bred Risa Pleger, a part-owner, asked him if he wanted to learn the art of molding and baking a pizza. He mastered the trick of flattening the dough and spreading patches of mozzarella, tomato sauce and Romano over it.

"You have to press it very nicely and evenly and then press it from the back," he said as he moved the pizza with a paddle inside a brick oven heated to 1,100 degrees to prevent charring.

Rosa Vergara, 42, immigrated from Cuenca, Ecuador, 12 years ago and landed a job making jewelry for a garment district business. When the business failed five years ago, a Peruvian friend who worked at La Côte told her that the kitchen needed help. Jean-Jacques Rachou, the owner of the longtime institution of haute cuisine that has had two name changes and a makeover in recent years, said Mrs. Vergara worked under his pastry chefs and one day told him, " 'Give me the chance and I can show you I can do it.' "

"And she does it," he said.

The decorative skills she had learned in the jewelry trade came in handy. As she spoke with a visitor, she squeezed chocolate and vanilla sauce from plastic bottles into neat zigzags to adorn a plate holding a raspberry mousse she made earlier in the day, then dappled the mousse with blueberries.

Mr. Rachou also taught the art of fashioning French delicacies to her 25-year-old sister, Mayra. He had to.

"French cooks don't come to America anymore," he said. "They make more money in France."


At Totonno's on Second Avenue in Manhattan, the pizza maker, Phuntsok Tashi, is Tibetan, and immigrated five years ago from India.


Mayra Molina, left and Rosa Vergara in the kitchen of Brasserie La Côte Basque.>