Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

19 Her Second Home, the One without Wheels: KIM IMA IN THE WEST VILLAGE (February 21, 2010)

1 0 9 19 Her Second Home, the One without Wheels Kim Ima in the West Village fEBRUARy 21, 2010 Kim Ima, creator of the Treats Truck, in her West Village one-bedroom. (Michael Appleton for The New York Times) 1 1 0 Back in the 1970s, one of the staples of New York starter apartments was a poster advertising rye bread, an image that featured a member of a decidedly non-Jewish ethnic group—Asian, American Indian, African-American—along with the tagline “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.” But if there’s any place where the poster is an appropriate item of décor, it’s the West Village apartment of Kim Ima, a half-Japanese (on her father’s side), half-Jewish (on her mother’s side) transplant from California who has given New York the Treats Truck, one of the most beloved purveyors of street food. If you’ve ever seen a smiling woman in a gray vehicle with red, white, and blue accents dispensing raspberrytopped brownies and Rice Krispies squares on a New York street corner, you’re familiar with this institution. Ms. Ima’s version of the poster, featuring an Asian boy gazing solemnly at an enormous rye-bread sandwich, occupies a prominent spot in her one-bedroom apartment on Bank Street. And perched on the desk opposite sits a photograph of her late maternal grandparents, Rose and Richard Miller, a reminder that Ms. Ima's familial roots in the city run deep. Mr. Miller grew up here, and around the turn of the last century, his father, Ruben, operated a pushcart on the Lower East Side. “We think he sold pots and pans,” Ms. Ima says—not quite sugary concoctions like oatmeal jammies, chocolate chippers, or sugar dots, three of the Treats Truck’s more delectably named items, but evidence that hawking merchandise from a vehicle on the streets of New York runs in the family. Ms. Ima, who is 42 but looks a decade younger, was raised in San Diego. Yet New York always held a fascination for her. When she was little, her grandfather used to tell her stories about Charlotte Russes he bought on the Lower East Side, and as a child, she tried to replicate this iconic New York pastry, carefully tucking ladyfingers and custard into tiny paper cups. In 1991, after graduating from U.C.L.A., Ms. Ima moved to New York, where she earned a master of fine arts degree from Columbia and plunged into a career as an actor and dancer. A role that held special meaning involved a project by a Seattle troupe about the internment camps to which Japanese-Americans, including her father and other relatives , had been confined during the Second World War. But it was in New York that she found her true professional home. In 1996, she made her H E R S E C O N d H O M E , T H E O N E w I T H O U T w H E E L S 1 1 1 way to La MaMa, the venerable downtown theater company where she ultimately spent a decade working as a performer and a director. And thanks in part to La MaMa she embarked upon what would become the robust second chapter of her career. Baking had always been a part of Ms. Ima’s life; those Charlotte Russes were just the beginning. “I have very warm memories of baked goods as a way of reaching out to people,” she says, and even more than most little girls, she treasured the experience of making chocolate-chip cookies with her mother on rainy days. Yet only when she started whipping up brownies for La MaMa’s hungry players, a group notable for minimal incomes combined with appetites sharpened by intense physical labor, did she realize that baking for a crowd might be more than a hobby. “I was obsessed,” she says of this period in her life. “I’d have baking parties, and dinner parties where we had seven courses, all of them desserts.” Some concoctions were great. Others, notably those involving Jell-O, somewhat less so. But the effort made her feel, she says, “like a grown-up Girl Scout, working for the world’s biggest merit badge.” And something that Ellen Stewart, La MaMa’s legendary founder and a mentor to...