NY Times Profiles Avenue U’s Octopus Garden And The Christmas Seafood Rush
Every Christmas, dedicated Italian-Americans committed to their traditions celebrate the Feast of Seven Fishes. For Bensonhurst’s Octopus Garden (88 Avenue U), this means a holiday rush of people celebrating a tradition of only eating seafood during the Christmas season.
The tradition, according to a New York Times profile of the business, comes from a time when the Catholic church deemed Christmas Eve to be a day of fasting, so seafood, apparently not considered food, became a popular alternative.
Here’s the scene Octopus Garden’s owner Vincent Gutrone envisioned during the interview with the Times as happening this morning, when the rush begins in preparations for tomorrow’s dinners:
By the peak crush midmorning on Dec. 23, their sleepy shop will be transformed into what Mr. Cutrone’s wife calls “the pit.”
This year, he is contemplating a doorman to keep things orderly. “I wake up at 4 a.m.,” he said, shaking his head. “I feel like that guy that makes the doughnuts.”
He also bulks up his inventory, laying out conch, langoustines, head-on shrimp, eels, salt cod, live clams, mussels, oysters and a school of silvery sardines on ice.
Mr. Cutrone’s not-so-secret weapons are his “tenderizers,” three giant metal tanks that function like industrial-size octopus-washing machines. Eaten straight from the sea, octopus is tough. But after a 30-minute tumble, said Mr. Cutrone, the texture softens from shoe leather to succulence. You can tell they’re ready when the tentacles begin to curl, he said, a state known in Italian as polpo arricciato.
The restaurant’s been in the neigbhorhood for about 30 years ago, originally on Stillwell Avenue and owned by an immigrant family who grew up in an Italian province where fishermen beat octpus on the rocks to make them tender. It’s now under a different owner, but Cutrone keeps the local tradition a alive.