when you want, where you want.
Momofuku Goes Island Hopping
Photo: Hugo Yu
Stock in good feeling is sinking of late. An atmosphere of headache prevails. The markets, the mood, the outlook: low, low, low. That’s a lot to heap on a restaurant, especially one down an East Village cul-de-sac: Oh, look, another dead end. But Kabawa, which opened under the aegis of the Momofuku group in the space that once housed its tasting room, Ko, aims to elevate. Cooks carom behind the counter in tie-dyed aprons and hats embroidered life is good. The menu comes with two instructions: “Love yuh self. Eat yuh guts full.”
How many restaurants are dedicated to making their diners feel happy? I never realized how rare they are until Kabawa made me think about it over a few visits. Plenty of recent openings seem more focused on making guests feel rich — plying them with luxury and rarity, caviar by the spoonful as chicken eggs spike — and then making them feel, on the sidewalk after the spell’s been broken, poor. You’ll spend at Kabawa, where the three-course prix fixe runs $145 a head before drinks. But the return on investment is more mood enhancing than many of the chillier dinners I’ve had around town lately. I left Kabawa lighter in pocket and in spirit.
Paul Carmichael, Kabawa’s chef, began cooking in New York years ago, when he arrived, via Barbados, to the Culinary Institute of America, then to Aquavit. (“I think he knows Rihanna,” our waitress stage-whispered to us. “They’re about the same age.”) After a stint at wd~50, he joined the Momofuku group, cooking at Má Pêche in midtown and opening Seiobo in Sydney, before rising to become culinary director of the entire company. He’s known his current home since it was Ko. The resemblance ends there. Kabawa is unlike any restaurant Momofuku has ever opened in New York. It’s Carmichael’s ode not only to his own Bajan upbringing but to the entire Caribbean diaspora, bringing in flavors and techniques from Puerto Rico and Jamaica to Guadeloupe, Guyana, and Martinique, their native cuisines as well as the complicated, mixed-bag bequests of their colonizers. If that sounds worryingly earnest, it doesn’t eat that way. It’s just delicious.
Any dinner at Kabawa begins with a platter of roti, the West Indian flatbread, to be torn and used to scoop chickpea curry, or pickled eggplant salad, or shrimp-and-egg mayo. “Act like you’re at home,” our server told us one night as we sat around the wooden counter that rings the kitchen. The proximity of the cooks is an inducement, not a deterrent, to messy eagerness. From there, choices abound. Jamaican pepper shrimp is served gelatinously raw, dusted with deep-purple hibiscus powder and little dollops of hot, floral Scotch-bonnet jam. A breadfruit tostón is piled with tender octopus in “dog sauce” — Martinican sauce chien, a kind of Creole salsa verde with chiles, parsley, and lime. Soft, curdy scrambled eggs are served with sweet plantains (an homage to Carmichael’s childhood breakfasts) cheffed up with a sprinkle of dehydrated salt cod, like a Caribbean bonito, and caviar. I smiled at the fruity sweetness of the plantains and the dusty shock of the fish, albeit less so at the caviar and its $50 supplement. Who needs it?
Unlike the eggs-and-eggs, I have no problem recommending the “chuletas can can,” even with its $75 supplement, a take on a Puerto Rican pork preparation that dates hazily to the ’50s. A rainbow-shaped chop of loin, rib, belly, and skin is given little cuts along the outer edge — the resulting frill, like the hem of a cancan dancer’s skirt, gives the dish its name — before it’s fried, so that the chicharrones sizzle to a bacon-chip crisp while the belly, miraculously, stays tender and fatty. Girlishly frilled though it may be, it is also, unblushingly, dinosaur-size. The running joke here is that anyone who finishes it gets their photo on the wall, and no one’s made it yet.
Carmichael knows how to coax deep, almost outrageous flavors from even simple dishes. A “jerk” duck sausage, with a coffeelike richness and subtle heat, is a little marvel of adaptation. I don’t expect to have a more tender square of goat, served simply in a stewy dried-scallop curry and crowned with a few fried curry leaves, this year.
I don’t mean to be Pollyannaish. There are things to regret about Kabawa. Its dark, somewhat grim dining room. The quiet that seems to have shrouded its opening (confused, I suspect, by the prior opening of next door’s Bar Kabawa and not helped much by its untrammeled street). Nevertheless, as commanded, I ate my guts full, and on a recent evening, three friends and I got up from our seats in a now-empty restaurant, shocked to find we’d been there for four hours. (Ko’s locally famous wine cellar, navigated and parceled out with unusual cheer by Eitan Spivak, probably helped.) Dessert lingered in front of us: scraps of an enormous cream-cheese-frosted loaf called a coconut turnover, a last bite of a thin bar of “birthday” flan so dense I wondered whether it might not just be a caramel-topped stick of butter. “Why birthday?” I asked Carmichael about the little dollop of whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles that was served alongside. Was it a family tradition, a portrait of the chef as a young man? The grinch in me wondered if it was even necessary. Nah, he replied. No story. “It’s just joy,” he said. “And I want people to have it.”
Kabawa
To Finish
I’d recommend any of the desserts, but my favorite was the scoop of coconut sorbet served platelessly in the crook of a half-coconut.
Not Just a Bar
Bar Kabawa next door, despite the name, is an entirely different restaurant with an entirely different menu of small snacks and a rum-focused drinks list.
But If You Do Go There
Try a daiquiri with underutilized, eucalyptus-y rhum agricole, made from sugarcane rather than molasses.
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