Broadway actor slurps ramen before shows
Cary Tedder enjoys a bowl of ramen. Photo: Sophia Morris.
Cary Tedder loudly slurps up the noodles in his bowl of ramen, unconcerned that other customers in the dimly-lit ramen shop are making an effort to eat their food quietly, sipping on their soup and daintily chewing their noodles. Tedder’s serenity comes from knowing that in Japan, slurping your food is a sign of appreciation.
Tedder is having his regular order, shoyu ramen with pork, corn and an egg, along with a Sapporo beer, at Tabata Ramen, an unassuming restaurant on 9th Avenue near the Port Authority. A performer in the Broadway show “Honeymoon in Vegas,” the 28-year-old is slim, with a boyish face, a stubble-length beard and light brown hair that he covers with a newsboy cap. He is quick to laugh and smile, radiating self-confidence.
A self-described ramen connoisseur, he first discovered it while living in Brooklyn, where his favorite ramen spot was Yebisu Ramen in Williamsburg. “I loved it, I really loved it,” said Tedder enthusiastically. “And then I started saying, ‘I’m going to explore more of this around the city, and see what kind of ramen shops I can get myself into.’ Only lately have I picked up on Tabata, and now it’s sort of become a staple between rehearsal and a show.”
Tedder said that when performing he needs to eat food that will give him the energy he needs to dance for extended periods of time. He believes that ramen fulfills this role. “Let me tell you, you can eat all the kale salad you want, you can have your pumpkin seed shakes and your juice between shows, but I don’t go on stage in a bikini like some of our girls,” he said. “I go onstage and I have to pick girls up in the air and put them down light as a feather, and that costs me energy. So what do I do, I eat things that make me feel good.”
“Ramen does this thing where it fills you up and you go sloshing out the door,” he said. “But over the next hour or so, the liquid moves through, and your stomach, having been stretched is now at a comfortable place where it can deal with the noodles and the bamboo shoots and other things. And I like that feeling. I like feeling full, but only for a little while.”
Tedder lives with his girlfriend in Woodside, Queens. “My girlfriend eats very, very healthily,” he said. “She loves the organic stuff, and the sprouted breads and she’s gluten-free and all that. I try and be her balance. I try and be the one who’s always trying to convince her to eat more of the Ben and Jerry’s and drink more beer.” He is excited by the diversity of his Queens neighborhood, and the myriad food choices that it offers. He is also continuing his ramen exploration. “They just opened up a little shop out there called Mu Ramen,” he said. “Mu is fantastic.”
The shoyu ramen at Tabata Ramen.
Photo: Sophia Morris.
Tedder wasn’t always as daring in his food choices. He grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, where he never used a chopstick or debated the merits of shoyu versus tonkotsu ramen. “When I was growing up my father did all the cooking,” he said. “My dad used to get a whole chicken, gut it and then put his hand in it and chase me and my sister around the house. He would do collard greens, ham hocks, salmon cakes. We ate a lot of stuff like that.”
Cornbread was a family staple. “He would do cornbread, and I mean legit style Georgia cornbread,” said Tedder. “Cornbread as a food is greatly misunderstood. And it varies depending on where you are. A lot of people want to make it like a cake, so it’s very sweet, maybe even cinnamony. We never grew up with that. We grew up with it made in a cast iron skillet. It was very bland, it was very dry, intended to soak up stuff like black-eyed peas. You put that down, you put the wet stuff on top of it.”
His adventures in food began when he left home to attend the University of Michigan, where he studied musical theatre. “That’s when I really started opening my palate,” he said. “When I started meeting people from other parts of the planet with entirely different ideas of what soul food meant.”
Tedder has been a working actor for ten years. He started working in regional theater while still in college, and has appeared in four Broadway shows. Despite this success, there have also been long periods of unemployment. “To be an actor is to be willing to be humiliated over and over and over again,” said Tedder. He auditioned four times for “Honeymoon in Vegas,” describing the process as intimidating. “What you have to do is be brave,” he said.
Tedder is a dancer who can sing and act, but he said that even this array of skills is not enough to secure success in musical theatre. “These days triple threat is obsolete,” he said. “You have to be a septuplet threat. You have to be able to play the piano, write poetry, act Shakespeare and then do a tap dance. You have to do a handstand, and a backflip, and juggling. I’ve done so much crazy shit on Broadway.”
The challenges of the industry invigorate him. “When I step into a theatre, and smell the space, and I see the seats, and I feel the heat of the lights, and I feel the weird Elvis costume I’m wearing, and I see some kid laughing, it’s like, this is why I’m alive, it’s why I’m here, and that provides wonderful fulfillment,” he said.
This sense of fulfillment is what keeps him going. “Acting is what you can do your entire life long, and in musical theatre, if you’re not acting, your song and dance won’t mean anything,” he said, using his chopsticks to scoop up the last of his noodles. “If it’s what I’m going do the rest of my life, I couldn’t tell you. But at this point, I have to. It’s not an obligation as much as it is a calling.”
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