The images on this page are from a pop-up kitchen in December organized by Ghetto Gastro, a collective providing new perspectives on food preparation and presentation that pay tribute to much-loved block food and drinks, repurposed with a focus on health and flare.
Located in an empty East Village store front, the space included a kitchen and was decorated with the fixtures and items shown here, all of them immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent time in a poor/working class city neighborhood. It’s funny, while people often work to escape the dangers and limitations that come with living in a poor neighborhood, they still have love for the markers of their upbringing, whether Newport signs, bottles of Old English 800, nutcrackers sold out of coolers or greasy chopped cheese sandwiches.
Ghetto Gastro collective connection to its New York neighborhoods is real, one can literally feel the love, which is a nice change from how block culture is normally brought up. More typically the markers of the culture are extracted from the block and used by those who have little connection to their origin much less the struggle that accompanied those landmarks. It’s a phenomenon that is especially painful when the money made off the cool never seems to find its way back to the places that produced it in the first place.
