Just out of curiosity, I went into a grocery store called “Straight from the Market” on First Avenue and Ninety-First Street a week or so ago and was delighted to discover that it was a specialty store owned by Turks and featured goods like simit, a kind of Turkish bagel that is sold on the streets of Istanbul.
The other night me and the wife went to Marmara, a new restaurant across the street that featured Turkish cuisine. It used to be called Benelli’s, an Italian joint, even though the owners were Turkish and the same people now running Marmara. They figured out that the market for Italian food was saturated. My wife, who is Turkish, generally has little use for Turkish restaurants in New York but was pleased with this one, especially the zucchini pancake called mucver (pronounced mujver) that was on the meze, or appetizer, section of the menu. Now I don’t give a good god-damn if the people working in the grocery store or the restaurant were “legal” or not. They are not stealing jobs from anybody but helping to keep the cultural diversity of New York intact. For as long as I have lived in New York, this is one of the things that appeals to me most. I love the fact that I can walk ten blocks north on 3rd Avenue and enter Spanish Harlem with its rich variety of bodegas, Mexican tortilla stands and botanicas. Who in their right mind would want to pressure such people to speak English and open up McDonald’s? full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/turkish-food-arizona-nativism/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
