“This is the last one, Vinay,” I warned him.
We entered the restaurant. There was a buffet counter, a willfully haphazard arrangement of chairs and tables and refrigerators, and framed, violently colorful photographs attached to the walls: schoolchildren, sitting under a tree, receiving instruction from a teacher pointing at a blackboard; an idyll in which a long-haired maiden perched on a swing; a city in Pakistan at night. At the rear was a further dining area where men, eating in silence, stared intently at a television screen. Almost all the patrons were South Asian. “Look at what they’re having,” Vinay said despairingly. “Naan with vegetables. These guys are on a three-dollar budget.” While Vinay examined the menu, I wandered off to look at the television. To my amazement — I’d never seen this before in America — they were showing a cricket match: Pakistan versus New Zealand, broadcast live from Lahore. Shoaib Akhtar, a.k.a. the Rawalpindi Express, was bowling at top speed to the New Zealand captain, Stephen Fleming. I settled ecstatically into a seat.
Moments later, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It took a second or two to recognize Chuck Ramkissoon.
“Hey there, friend,” he said. “Come join us.” He was showing me a table occupied by a black man wearing a super’s shirt embroidered with the address of his building and his name, Roy McGarrell. I accepted Chuck’s invitation, and we were joined by Vinay, who arrived carrying a tray of gajrala and chicken karahi.
I urged Chuck and Roy to eat the food. “Vinay here’s paid to eat this stuff. You’d be doing him a favor.”
It turned out that Roy, like Chuck, was from Trinidad. “Callaloo,” Vinay remarked absently, and Roy and Chuck started chortling with delight. “You know callaloo?” Roy said. Addressing me, he said, “Callaloo is the leaves of the dasheen bush. You can’t get dasheen easy here.”
“What about that market on Flatbush and Church?” Chuck said. “You find it there.”
“Well, maybe,” Roy conceded. “But if you can’t get the real thing, you make it with spinach. You put in coconut milk: you grate the flesh of the coconut fine and you squeeze it and the moisture come out. You also put in a whole green pepper — it don’t be hot unless you burst it — thyme, chive, garlic, onion. Normally you put in blue crab; others put in pickled pig tails. You cook it and you bring out a swizzle stick and you swizzle it until the bush melt down into a thick sauce like a tomato sauce. That’s the old-time way; now we put it in a blender. Pour it on stewfish — kingfish, carite fish: mmm-hmm. You also eat it with yam, sweet potato. Dumpling.”
Chuck said to Vinay, “He’s not talking about Chinese dumplings.”
“Our dumpling different,” Roy said. “Chinese dumpling soft. We make our dumpling stiff.”
“Callaloo,” Chuck said wistfully.
“We used to eat it at Maracas Bay,” Roy said. “Or Las Cuevas. Maracas, the water more rough but the beach more popular. In Las Cuevas, the water calm. Easter time? Oh my Lord, it full. Sometime people walk for miles through the mountains to go there. You spend Easter Sunday and Easter Monday on the beach. You pack your bag with ingredients separate. You have your sweet drink — we call sodas sweet drink — and you pack your car and everybody take a bathing suit, and you go to the beach and spend the whole day eating, bathing. Oh my.” He shuddered with pleasure.
“I nearly drowned in Maracas once,” Chuck said.
“Them riptide there dangerous, boy,” Roy said.
Chuck handed a card to Vinay. “Maybe you could come by my restaurant sometime.”
Vinay examined the card. “Kosher sushi?”
“That’s what we do,” Chuck said proudly. He leaned over to point at the card. “That’s where we are — Avenue Q and Coney Island.”
“Business good?” I asked.
“Very good,” he said. “We cater to the Jews in my neighborhood. There are thousands and thousands of them, all observant.” Chuck handed me a card, too. “I have a Jewish partner who has the confidence of the rabbi. Makes things a lot easier. But I tell you, getting kosher certification is a tough business. Tougher than the pharmaceuticals business, I like to say. You wouldn’t believe the problems that come up. Earlier this year we had some trouble with seahorses.”
“Seahorses?” I said.
Chuck said, “You know how you check nori, the seaweed you wrap the sushi in? You examine it over a light box, like an X-ray. And they found seahorse infestation in our supplier’s seaweed. And seahorses are not kosher. Neither are shrimps and eels and octopus and squid. Only fish with scales and fins are kosher. But not all fish with fins have scales,” Chuck added. “And sometimes what you think are scales are in fact bony protrusions. Bony protrusions do not qualify as scales. No, sir.” Roy and he laughed loudly at this. “What are we left with? Halibut, salmon, red snapper, mackerel, mahi-mahi, tuna — but only certain kinds of tuna. Which ones? Albacore, skipjack, yellowfin.”
Chuck wasn’t going to stop there. He believed in facts, in their momentousness and charm. He had no option, of course: who was going to listen to mere opinion coming from him?
“What about fish eggs, roe?” he said, showing off. “The eggs of kosher fish are generally shaped differently from nonkosher fish. Also, they tend to be red, whereas nonkosher are black. Then there are issues with rice, issues with vinegar. Sushi vinegar will often contain nonkosher ingredients or will be made using a nonkosher process. There are issues with worms in the flesh of the fish, with utensils, with storage, with filleting, with freezing, with sauces, with the broths and oils you pack the fish in. Every aspect of the process is difficult. It’s a painstaking business, I’m telling you. But that’s my opportunity, you see. I don’t mind complication. For me, complication represents an opportunity. The more something is complicated, the more potential competitors will be deterred.”
“So you’re a restaurateur,” I said, moving my chair to let pass two dramatically bearded and turbaned men who had risen to their feet to face up to whatever night-toil awaited them.
“I’m a businessman,” Chuck quibbled agreeably. “I have several businesses. And what do you do?”
“I work at a bank. As an equities analyst.”
“Which bank?” Chuck asked, filling his mouth with Vinay’s chicken. When I told him, he improbably declared, “I have had dealings with M—. What stocks do you analyze?”
I told him, eyeing the television: Fleming had just punched Akhtar through the covers for four runs, and a groan of disgust mixed with appreciation sounded in the restaurant.
“Do you think there’s much left in the consolidation trend?”
I turned to give him my attention. In recent years, my sector had seen a rush of mergers and acquisitions. It was a well-known phenomenon; nevertheless, the slant of Chuck’s inquiry was exactly that of the fund managers who questioned me. “I think the trend is in place,” I said, rewarding him with a term of professional wiliness.