Urban Guerrilla 4: Mr. Curry's Secret Kitchen

Text by Pan Xing-ci

The area around Xinsheng South Road and Wenzhou Street in Taipei is full of low-key, quiet residences, along with independent bookstores rich in a strong cultural atmosphere, and the streets and alleys are lined with lively, rapidly changing restaurants; quite a few shops know how to dabble in plants and flowers, dressing up their storefronts in very splendid ways. But few people would discover that in an unnamed alley off Xinsheng South Road, the small restaurant "Mr. Curry" shines with an inner light.

The orange wall on the left side of the photo is where "Mr. Curry" is located

Window grilles, air conditioners and row upon row of scooters almost block the small patch of bright orange exterior wall outside the glass door; the low-key wooden signboard can be called the least pretentious on all of Wenzhou Street. Compared with the many "restaurants" that inject "business and marketing tactics" into food and food culture, to us "Mr. Curry" feels more like a secret "kitchen" hidden in the food map of neighbors and students. Mr. Curry is famous on Wenzhou Street for the freshness of its ingredients and its relaxed "home-cooked feel."

The owner, A-Zuo, is easygoing and accepting of his fate, plain and simple; come a few times and you should be able to feel it. So in the shoulder-to-shoulder shop, a certain long-lost mutual understanding and appreciation flows between people. Sometimes we were busy with end-of-term final reviews and went to eat too late; A-Zuo sat resting at the door and said the fridge had no ingredients left, and his old foot pain had flared up again, so he asked us to borrow a few eggs from the cake shop across the street; he wanted to fry eggs for us, saying we were all very familiar neighbors.

Exchanging Experience with Gorillas

Once, when the owner had finished a stretch of work, he chatted with us; hearing that we were from the horticulture department, he helplessly told us that he had grown mint several times before, because cooking Thai cuisine needs spice ingredients, and everyone told him a different way to grow it, but no matter how he grew it the mint would always die. Later, I told him that we had recently learned a method called "hugelkultur" and asked him to go to Jianguo Flower Market to buy materials, and we could help him plant a few pots of mint; he seriously wrote down the needed materials, but because he was too busy on the weekend he really had no time to go to the flower market. "Call me after you've bought them!" he said.

Later the Gorilla Green Guerrilla was founded, and I was responsible for organizing the "guerrilla projects." The donut guerrilla action on public land in Nangang was the first action; a month later the gourds were stolen, while the water spinach wilted from lack of water. We began to think that, apart from letting citizens who joined the action through online communities gain an awakening of "being owners of public land," food-growing thinking and horticultural skills, it was very hard to find direct community stakeholders willing to water and do follow-up plant maintenance, and no one even went to harvest the vegetables and fruit; this was the most regrettable part of the public-land guerrilla actions.

I remember that at the Gorilla reading group we discussed Richard Reynold's mention in Guerrilla Gardening of the so-called "guerrilla gardeners have two main enemies; these enemies are not people or organizations but two landscape states: scarcity and neglect." If we ignore even our own flower beds, balconies and the small spaces of alleys, what ability do we have to say we want to fight for more public arable land? Although the storefront of Mr. Curry is lifeless, the vegetable-growing troubles A-Zuo confided in me showed that he had once tried and also had a need to grow.

The gorillas are planting using the hugelkultur method

Based on wanting to give the kind A-Zuo, who works hard all day, a surprise, and wanting the coming-and-going customers and neighbors to long for "growing good vegetables, eating good food," the gorilla partners, after discussion, divided the work and prepared horticultural materials.

We five gorillas used multi-layered hugelkultur on a small patch of wild ground nearby, mixed-planting various herbs and vegetables (basil + thyme, rosemary + mint, purple perilla, lettuce) in eight half-wall pots; taking advantage of early morning while A-Zuo was still asleep, we hung a small green vegetable garden on the plain gray window grille, and the storefront seemed to come alive. When hanging the pots, the neighbor at the barber shop across the street was very happy that there was now a touch of green scenery in front of the door, and promised to help water.

A group photo of the gorillas in front of Mr. Curry

A few days later, Mr. Curry anxiously asked me how to care for these plants, so we gave him some diluted effective microorganisms and told him that once he observed the soil was dry he could water, and also taught him to recognize these herbs and vegetables.

 
One month after the guerrilla action, from left to right are "mint + rosemary" and "basil + thyme"

Three and a half months passed; the kitchen scraps in the hugelkultur were slowly decomposed by the effective microorganisms and released nutrients, and the purple perilla unexpectedly grew to over one meter, the mint and basil also grew lush and verdant, and the thyme and rosemary also lived up to expectations and survived; I, who had originally worried that there was not enough sunlight in the alley, was truly overjoyed.

When asked how Mr. Curry's owner A-Zuo actually cared for them, he said: "Just water and love for the plants!"

Interestingly, A-Zuo rarely harvests, because he feels the plants have grown large and beautiful, everyone can enjoy them, and he is happy; at most he sometimes cuts a bunch of basil to share with the barber shop neighbor across the street for cooking. Then he also revealed to me that he recently wanted to buy a lemon tree to plant. A window grille that was never loved can actually become more diverse and more inspiring.

If every household tried micro-farming, family members would eat healthily, the carbon footprint produced by food would be a little less, the look of the city would be less detestable, and people would be a little closer to one another. Hard to imagine, right! Growing some vegetables is just a relaxed and pleasant civic movement!