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Sign up todayMy Korean Deli
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Learn moreThis sweet and funny tale of a preppy editor buying a Brooklyn deli with his Korean in-laws is about family, culture clash, and the quest for authentic experiences.
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 to slice cold cuts and peddle lottery tickets by night. 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.
Ben Ryder Howe has written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and Outside, and his work has been selected for Best American Travel Writing. He is a former senior editor of Paris Review. My Korean Deli is his first book.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Reviews
“Conveys what is absolutely the best of New York. Delightful.”
“My Korean Deli is about a Korean deli, as I expected. But it’s also about love, culture clashes, family, money, and literature. Plus, it happens to be very funny and poignant. So buy a Slim Jim and a Vitamin Water and sit down to enjoy it.”
“I don’t know how else to explain My Korean Deli except to say that Ben Ryder Howe has made kimchi. As in that splendid staple dish of Korea, the mundane (cabbage/Brooklyn) is combined with the piquant (crazy spices/families) and pickled (natural fermentation/a job at the Paris Review). The result is overpoweringly good. But My Korean Deli will sweeten your reading rather than stinking up your house and will give you deep thoughts not breath that can kill mice in the walls.”
“[A] funny, poignant, true story.”
“It’s hard not to fall in love with My Korean Deli. First, it’s the (very) rare memoir that places careful, loving attention squarely on other people rather than the author. Second, it tells a rollicking, made-for-the-movies story in a wonderfully funny deadpan style.”
“Howe ably transforms what could have been a string of amusing vignettes about deli ownership into a humorous but heartfelt look into the complexities of family dynamics and the search for identity.”
“Poking fun at everything from his stereotypically WASP upbringing to his ‘tank’ (he said it) of a mother-in-law…Howe has created a smartly measured and propulsive read.”
“Fun! A crucial read if you’ve ever clerked checkout or are remotely entertaining the thought of buying a convenience store. Reads like a novel.”
“In this WASP-out-of-water tale of a Paris Review editor moonlighting as deli owner, Howe plunges boldly into life’s ultimate mysteries: marriage, money, cohabitation with in-laws, the yin-yang currents of striving and slacking, and—perhaps the biggest mystery of them all—why the store can be empty of customers for hours and hours, and then twenty show up at once.”
“Bronson Pinchot takes on the persona of the stuffy literary magazine editor for the first-person account. Between Howe’s wry phrasings and Pinchot’s slightly exaggerated reading, even a ramble on the profit margins of Doritos is amusing…There’s even a dead-on impression of Howe’s boss, the late George Plimpton.”
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