CHEESECAKE

An ancient Roman recipe finds its way to modern Manhattan.

Kurlansky’s novel is equally concerned with food and real estate as it charts the Upper West Side’s evolution from the 1970s through the ‘90s. A large cast of quirky characters congregates at the Katz Brothers Greek diner on West 86th Street, drawn by the best cheese dishes they’ve ever tasted—even though it’s “not exactly legal” for the Katsikas family to raise goats and make cheese in Queens. The area is “a bit down on its luck,” but Art, the family entrepreneur, sees a neighborhood “in transition,” which means rich people will be arriving soon. It’s not good news for tenants and diners when Art buys their building from its defaulting owner in the early ‘80s and transforms Katz Brothers into trendy Mykonos. This is where Marcus Porcius Cato’s 160 B.C.E. recipe for cheesecake enters the story, as Art asks sister-in-law Adara to translate Cato’s “incomprehensible” instructions into an edible cheesecake he can tout as “the oldest known written recipe.” Kurlansky is primarily a writer of nonfiction, and his inexperience as a novelist shows occasionally as the narrative zigzags among characters defined more by their backstories—artists’ model Violette de Lussac, TV producer Saul Putz (“pronounced pootz”), biologist-turned-pastry-maker Mimi Landau, et al.—than distinct personalities. It doesn’t really matter, though, because the atmosphere he creates is vivid and oh-so-New York, with one denouement at Saul’s daughter Masha’s bat mitzvah, where a rival version of Cato’s cheesecake is served, and another at a blowout party the night before Mimi loses her apartment, for which she and her friend Gerta make yet another version of Cato’s cheesecake and figure out the perfect way to get back at her evicting landlord.

Good fun, though it’s hard to imagine what non–New Yorkers will make of it.