Archestratus → on LIPARI ISLAND

WHAT IS INSIDE THIS LETTER?

some last last words

on the closing

In our world, Demeter is a figurine of a lady in a pink dress proudly holding up a pie. We stood her on a little welcome table outside the shop one day in late March of 2020, around the time when we started the outdoor grocery pick-ups. As the Greek goddess of the harvest, she was there to protect us.

On another day, her head falls clean off, and we say: SI.

On another day, a customer living on Huron Street, in a wild synchronicity, finds the exact same completely random figurine of the pie lady, head intact, and gifts it to me. 

So much has happened here.

A few months after we opened, a woman walked in, paused, stood still, looking around with only her head, and promptly started crying. She said the store reminded her of her childhood home, of being a child at home.

From the beginning, Archestratus was an offbeat gathering space, an inclusive place that thrived on the incredible Greenpoint community.

Another early memory is of this older guy, Joe, who used to come all the way from the Bronx to play board games with us. He was a self-described homebody curmudgeon type, except for this one time each month on Wednesday evenings: he would bring all these obscure food games, and we would play all night.

The container has a wide mouth.

At some point, absolute legends started to pass through Archie’s walls: Victor Hazan, Maira Kalman, Alice Fiering, Darina Allen, David Tanis, Fergus Henderson. Huge Stars like Parker Posey, Eileen Miles, Jo Firestone, and Robby Hoffman. Food Celebrities Katie Parla, Carla Lalli Music, Kim-Joy (twice! both times, immaculate), Michael Ruhlman, Natasha Pickowicz, Abra Berens, Nicola Lamb, and Maangchi. Cheffy chefs like Josh Niland, Sonoko Sakai, Arielle Johnson, Enrique Olvera, Meredith Kurtzman, Josh Ku, Trigg Brown, Rick Easton, Andy Ricker, and…Natasha Pickowicz! Stars before they were stars, like Hetty McKinnon, Dria Atentico of Salty Lunch Lady, Sadie Mae Burns of Ha’s Doc Bit, Chef Char Un of Kreung Cambodia, and Caroline Schiff.

Artists like Daniel Zender, Esther Choi, Shannon Taggart, Matt Marble…We’ve had a theremin player, a yodeler, and a bagpiper.

The shop held dinners featuring chefs and home cooks from many cultural backgrounds, not just Italian. Archestratus had Venezuelan dinners, a Taiwanese brunch, a Gujarati meal made by a mother and son, a meal inspired by bitter foods, a meal inspired by Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a five course dinner highlighting dal, a Surrealist dinner where you could draw on the table, a dinner inspired by the fabrics and ceramics on the table, Ukranain dinners with lots of fermented pickles and homemade dumplings, a dinner honoring balsamic vinegar from a chef who airshipped over sheeps milk ricotta from Italy, and dinners that celebrated the tomato many, many times over…

Very early after our opening, NY Magazine deemed our cookies the best in NYC. It felt extra sweet as they were simply recipes I had made up for cookies I would give my friends at Christmastime.

I started teaching classes. Any takers here for my 4-hour rainbow cookie class?

I wanted the space to feel alive, and it ended up feeling more than alive; it felt superhuman. That was never more true than when we started hosting bake sales. It got to the point where 100 bakers would sign up within 24 hours. We raised tens of thousands of dollars over a decade. The money went to humanitarian aid efforts in places like Ukraine and Palestine, to support food and housing relief after the Los Angeles fires, to the Biden campaign in 2020, and, most recently, to protect vulnerable Minnesotans from ICE agents, which raised just over $12,000 in one weekend. FUCK ICE.

Remember when we asked the men to bake for women’s reproductive rights?

Archestratus had social clubs, all completely free, for people to talk philosophy, to write poetry, to craft and draw alongside one another, a film club, an ‘Artist’s Way’ group, a cat club where people would organize to feed the stray cats in the hood, an Italian language group, and a Women’s Table which was forged the moment after Trump was first elected in 2016. Our future Representative, Emily Gallagher, even came to present to twenty-plus women who gathered to process grief and fight misogyny, forging friendships that lasted far beyond the meetings.

We’ve celebrated so many authors in Archestratus Cookbook Club, from Patience Gray to Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor to Samin Nosrat, when almost no one had heard of the now ubiquitous ‘Cookbook Club’ concept. I hadn’t either and just thought it was a nice idea that felt more like something plucked from the sky than something invented. We counted, and the number is close to 90 cookbook clubs over ten years.

I haven’t even really touched on the cafe we had for eight years, and the Sicilian Blue Plate Special dinners where I would cook like a little maniac EVERY Thursday, often for fifty people, and sometimes Nonna and Papa would come, too. Nonna was often a menace at these events; I treasure them.

Arancine, meatballs, eggplant parm, fennel salad, orange and olive salad, Nonna’s half chicken, pane cunzatu, roast pork, caciocavallo, broccoli rabe with garlic confit, spattini, sardines with sweet and sour onions, a phase where I made a lot of soups, a phase where I made a lot of pies, a phase where I made a lot of herbal drinks, trapanese pesto, swordfish with currants and pine nuts (recipe for that coming next week), and so on.

Archestratus kept adding to itself like a dream.

Who knows? Maybe our new tenants will hear something inexplicable to them in that moment. Like, maybe Katie's and my karaoke rendition of ‘You Oughta Know’ is carved forever into these walls (we did a lot of karaoke). Or they’ll get a whiff of garlic and onions slowly getting sweet and turning green for our tomato sauce recipe. I still don’t know why that happens. (See past newsletter on making Eggplant Parm.)

Bless all the thrilling, glossy new cookbooks that passed through our hands and into yours. Bless all the incomparable, often hilarious, vintage cookbooks that graced the shelves. O, how my favorite thing in the world is to ‘go pickin’ for old cookbooks, and O, how I will miss it.

On the day Demeter’s head fell cleanly off, we said: SI. Shortly after, a customer, now a friend, with whom I had a drink the other day, living on Huron Street, in a wild synchronicity, found the same completely random figurine, head intact, and gifted it to me.

Why the hell am I triggered?

I think it was that I loved the broken nature of this figurine. I understood the risk of putting her on a shitty table that a hundred people would shuffle past that day.  I knew she was overworked and overstimulated, but I loved gluing her head on top of the pie itself and saying, "Va bene, va boonay,” and calling it a day. Tough woman, si?

On most days, the brokenness made me feel alive and radical! It reminds me of something the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once said:

“If you don’t get the little kernel of madness in someone, then you can’t love them. If you don’t seize their point of insanity, you fall short. The location of someone’s insanity is the source of all their charm.”

I love and embrace the broken bits of life, the insane bits. If you run a business, you really have to. Part of me loves from that kernel outwards, and I love this self, but, on the other side, I see clearly the one who chooses to remain willfully broken.

I didn’t know I could receive wholeness until it was handed to me. The warmth of wholeness. The wholeness of help. The wholeness of attention.  The wholeness of friendship. The wholeness that only a community can sway.

Maybe you felt in the decade that, si — the container at Archestratus was wide, but even more moving to me — it was so full.

When something is plainly true to all, when we operate in totality, the care feels infinite. Sometimes, I honestly can’t tell if the goodwill is taken or given, which makes me think it’s cycling through so fast that it is both and neither. I have seen with my own eyes its power. Like waking a sleeping giant. The power of neighboring.

We were our own universe together.

I must tell you how my life will never be quite like this again.

Thank you so so so so so so so so so so so much. Thank you for coming to the shop in April. Thank you for exactly seven months and ten timeless years. Thank you for letting me share really, really specific pieces of my soul, kernals of madness, my gifts (which are the hardest sometimes to give) and thank you for sharing yours back. My heart has been filled with gratitude almost to the point of exhaustion since we announced the closing.

For the people who came by the shop, who donated, who brought gifts and flowers, who wrote letters, emails, who subscribed to this newsletter in support of my next path — thank you. I am still in the process of getting back to many of you. I am so moved. 

I will end with a recipe. When we first opened, some people thought we were an architecture bookshop, which I never minded because I like architecture, and a sense of place felt important and related. Remember that: before Archestratus was a real place, it was an imagined place.

I don’t think I will ever be done working on this recipe, but here is where it’s at now. It’s pretty short. Love.

video of an empty shop with friendly ghosts

T H E

L A T E S T

Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.

A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.

"The body may be divine, but it can only be seen in such close focus that individual limbs can hardly be distinguished: we are left with flesh and bone, plus a few spinning hormones." —Joanna Walsh, The National

a

Nonna echo

the

F I S H

S A U C E

on the

L I N A

sandwich

a k a

ENZA

spread

For the first few years in business, I would bake cookies, focaccia, and biscuits fresh every morning. BUT THE PEOPLE WANTED SANDWICHES. Sandwiches. Also, sandwiches and sandwiches.

How could I share more of my beloved Sicily through sandwiches? And not just ones that were already famous sandwiches like Pane Cunzatu or Vastedde, but rather memories of other dishes channeled into the form of Sandwich? This was my self-inflicted mission.

The very first sandwich was the LINA. It started with a memory of a dish my cousin ENZA made. If you are new to this space, these are my family members who live in Alcamo, by the way!

My memory was at the farmhouse in Alcamo, where my family lives in the warmer months. This was maybe twenty years ago now, which is quite alarming to think about, but Enza brought out a plate of grilled white fish, maybe Sea Bream or Branzino, topped with a raw salady mixture. What could I decipher? Olive oil, grated carrot, celery, parsley, lemon zest, and maybe minced fresh garlic? It was so simple, completely delicious, and is tattooed on my brain.

Back to the sandwich menu: I knew I wanted a Tuna one. Crudo was also floating around in my mind. I found something that sort of gave off the vibe of both and neither: Cold-Smoked Tuna. It was the perfect third thing.

Ok, ok, ok, so we have the salty-fishy, herbaceous-fresh carrot salad — we need bitter. Let’s add Trevisano Radicchio, okie?, but we also need a little sweetness, spice, and fat.

The ENZA Spread turned into a Who’s Who of Sicilian flavors + lots of mayo. (I’m the American Cousin, after all.)

One day, I felt the call to finally attempt this very first Archestratus sandwich that had been rattling around in my head. I was nervous about sharing, but decided to split it with my friend and employee, Roy. I had felt propelled from beginning to end to develop this thing; why wouldn’t it taste just as good as that glided feeling?

We took our first bite, and both laughed. For me, it took me back to Sicily, and to Roy, he went on a little vacation to a place he had never been and said, "Wait, what?"

I thank the gods 24/7, yo. We are not only here to faithfully echo our ancestors' recipes, but also to keep them alive by letting them go and allowing something new to come. That is what was mainly passed down to me from my female ancestors in the kitchen: the ability to trust and allow for creation.

People also seemed to really enjoy the LINA. Below is a little write-up from EATER.

When the pandemic hit, I had to sell off every component of the sandwiches right away. Prepared foods were born! We started mixing ENZA’s spread into bean salad and potato salad and discovered its versatility. I am including those recipes below, too.

Next week, there will be another FISH SAUCE for Cripes subscribers. Love.

R E C I P E S

for

Enza’s spread, Lina’s salad, + Potato Salad

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