My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store
Ratings3
Average rating3.7
15
Ratings3
Average rating3.7
This warm and funny tale of an earnest preppy editor finding himself trapped behind the counter of a Brooklyn convenience store is about family, culture and identity in an age of discombobulation. It starts with a gift, when Ben Ryder Howe's wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents' self-sacrifice by buying them a store. Howe, an editor at the rarefied Paris Review, agrees to go along. Things soon become a lot more complicated. After the business struggles, Howe finds himself living in the basement of his in-laws' Staten Island home, commuting to the Paris Review offices in George Plimpton's Upper East Side townhouse by day, and heading to Brooklyn at night to slice cold cuts and peddle lottery tickets. My Korean Deli follows the store's tumultuous life span, and along the way paints the portrait of an extremely unlikely partnership between characters with shoots across society, from the Brooklyn streets to Seoul to Puritan New England. Owning the deli becomes a transformative experience for everyone involved as they struggle to salvage the original gift—and the family—while sorting out issues of values, work, and identity.
Reviews with the most likes.
Easily a 3.5 star book. I read it in a weekend – a rare occurrence in my world – and enjoyed every minute of it. I really appreciated/enjoyed his non-whiney, deer-in-headlights take on opening and running a deli with his wife and Korean in-laws.
I would have read this at the beach, except I'm not at the beach. I'm stuck staring down the deadline for a huge grad school obligation. Blah. But this was a fun bit of distracting fluff. Ryder Howe could have been obnoxiously pretentious (I think my roommate thought he was), but I found him droll. Just the right book at the right time, you know? And an interesting sliver of the deli scene in NYC, interracial marriages, and the inner workings of a hoity-toity literary magazine. Quite the cultural smorgasbord.
My Korean Deli by Ben Ryder Howe
There are books I read that make me wish I were as good at reviewing books as I am at reading them. This book is one of these.
Howe is the WASP-iest of WASPs, with Pilgrim ancestors who came over on the first boats, and an A+ education. He's an editor at the Paris Review which, to the five of us who continue to salute the written word, is up there with the Supreme Ruler of the Western World. He's married to a woman who is a new immigrant, with that killer drive which leaves the rest of us watching her zip by as we watch by the edge of the highway, dazzled and dazed.
The story is really the story of America today told with both humor and sadness, an America sitting proudly on its crumbling throne, an America where new immigrants vigorously race around to throw together businesses that fail nevertheless, where intelligence doesn't work, where energy doesn't work, where nothing works, where everyone is left sad and bewildered. All in a humorous way.
A rough start - I don't know why approaching it as a novel instead of a memoir threw me off. The thought of a Boston bred, liberal arts WASP working at the Paris Review with George Plimpton while taking ownership of a faltering Brooklyn deli with Korean immigrant in-laws felt too contrived, heavy handed almost.
Thankfully he handles the two worlds with a light hand and I began settling into the narrative. “Truth” is stranger than fiction and the memoir moniker extended author Ben Howe bit of slack. I enjoyed his brand of navel gazing and digression that avoided veering too far into wry, hand-wringing New Yorker.
