WITH A DEAD baby pig in her arms, Anne Apparu receives news that her good friend and former brother-in-law Dash Snow, has died. But instead of breaking down, Apparu has a meal to cook. So she gathers her ingredients from various local sources like East Village Cheese, the coop on 7th Street and Essex Street Market, and heads home to her loft apartment and well-stocked kitchen in the East Village.
“I decided to dedicate the meal to him,” she says, mixing sunflower seeds with crushed peanuts into the soft cheese she has bought. “The dinner is about life and death.”
The feast Apparu prepares is for the Carnival of Ascension, a circle-of-life-themed meal featuring fresh herbs over wheat berries, white and pink beets, potatoes and cheese ball “ovaries” and “testes.” Using garlic jam—a remnant from her time running the Chop Shop with her older sister Agathe—she stuffs and coats whole roasted rabbits, chickens and the pig.Then, with a sprinkling of Chilean sea salt, she pops them in the oven, four trays at a time.While one round of meat roasts, she chops lovage, chives and sage and boils the potatoes.Turning her attention to the Cornish hens that have just arrived, she cleans them, giving the innards to her dog, who eagerly licks them up.
“Anything but bunny hearts,” she says and smiles. “I think he sometimes wishes he was with a vegetarian.”
Within five hours, all the food is ready to be laid out on a banquet table so guests can see it as they enter. For dessert, Apparu has made “decomposing body cake,” a sponge cake layered over a nude woman and filled in with strawberry puree. Not bad for the first day of the carnival’s three days, and Apparu is planning to prepare food for all of them.
This isn’t the first eccentric meal Apparu has been a part of, nor the first time she has hosted a bevy of hungry, paying strangers in her home. This renegade dinner-party style mirrors her yearlong project, the 18th Restaurant.Taking place each month on (or around) the 18th—September’s meal is on the 16th at the Angel Orensanz Foundation on Norfolk Street—and can run anywhere between one night and multiple days.The location changes each time, and Apparu’s meals change, too, from edible flower-laden tables to purely vegetarian fare. But, one theme remains the same: local, organic produce.
“I can’t use anything that has been mistreated,” she says in a lilting French accent.
Aside from the Union Square Green Market and a friend’s farm upstate, Apparu uses some of the plants growing in her own garden on the 3,000 square-foot roof of the artist workspace Collective Hardware, just off the corner of Bowery and Delancey Street.
“Something just picked will always give you way more power,” she says, describing how she would like food to grow from every open space. “I really want to turn the whole city into an edible jungle.”
It’s not quite a jungle yet, but boxes and pots filled with various herbs, tomatoes, strawberries, chives, garlic, lettuces, a fig tree and other not immediately identifiable plants litter the spacious roof.
She uses the space with her cohort Rachel Crocker, a Massachusetts native who grew up on a farm and shares Apparu’s vision for a greener city. Rony Rivellini, one of the founders of Collective Hardware, also shares Apparu’s dream. He asked her to be a part of his communal vision because he wanted “to create an environment where others can create theirs,” and he felt her project fit right in. Now she is a fraction of his Lower East Side art collective, which already includes The Showcase (a sporadic retail shop), The Peter Vancek Salon, multiple recording and editing studios, and an elusive clothing boutique called The Closet.
“The decision to have her follow her dream and vision of a garden was easy,” Rivellini says in an email. “I come from strong Italian Heritage, food is like space, and to have it and not use it is wasteful.”
Which is why he lets her use the roof for free. He has even given her the go ahead to serve her creations in the spot below the garden where she hopes to one day open up a café. So far, however, it’s been a slow process.
“I think the garden is so young, we wouldn’t get much,” she says as she adjusts a fallen plant. “The lease here is for 20 years, so I am in no rush.”
>The 18th Restaurant
Sept. 16, Angel Orensanz Foundation (172 Norfolk St., betw. Stanton & E Houston Sts.), the18threstaurnt@gmail.com; 7, $27
anonymous
