A friend calls Despot “the secret guy behind all the downtown shit,” but before he was running things downtown, he was running wild on the border of Forest Hills and Corona
Despot at his restaurant. Photo: Evan Angelastro The first time I saw Alec “Despot” Reinstein driving a car, he was flipping a dune buggy on Chillin Island, the HBO show he co-hosts with Ashok “Dap” Kondabolu and Aleksey “Lakutis” Weintraub. So it’s a relief when Despot picks me up in his actual car, a black Porsche 911, and something of a shock when he finds a parking spot right outside the deli where we had agreed to meet, as if it were reserved for him all along.
, which is where we’re starting our trip today. We grab our sandwiches at Mama’s — Despot always orders whatever the special is, plus mushrooms and peppers — and walk over to the tiny park itself. We sit down at a chess table and talk about local celebrity, Obama — the neighborhood bocce player who looks like the former president, not the former president himself — and the red-sauce joint across the street, Park Side.
When he got older, he started trekking to the city to go to places like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and in high school he started rapping. After releasing his first song in 2001, he was signed by the rapper and producer EL-P and worked on music with Evan Mast of Ratatat. His releases were rare, which Stereogum noted in 2015, when he put out “House of Bricks,” calling him a “great New York underground rapper” who has “barely released anything under his own name.