Chef Paul Carmichael at Kabawa, the brand new restaurant he’ll open with Momofuku in February.
Photograph: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
On the peak of its sprawl, Momofuku’s empire comprised 13 eating places throughout six cities on two continents. There have been fast-casual satellites (Milk Bar, Fuku, Bāng Bar) and a companion journal. Tying all of it collectively was David Chang’s bro-chef sensibility, a expertise for mixing East Asian methods and American consolation meals that has now been distilled right into a grocery line of instantaneous ramen and condiments, Chang’s Ringer podcast, and his Netflix cooking present. On the identical time, the variety of full-service Momofuku eating places dwindled to 4. However the newest to shut, Ko, is popping into the corporate’s first completely new restaurant since 2019: Kabawa is a reimagining of what a Momofuku restaurant will be — I didn’t see one peach illustration as I walked by way of lately — with chef Paul Carmichael stepping in to guide.
Carmichael has really spent greater than a decade within the Momo orbit. He was the chief chef at Má Pêche in midtown and ran Seiobo, the corporate’s restaurant in Sydney, Australia, the place his 14-course tasting menus included dishes resembling charred breadfruit with butter and cassava gnocchi with mud crab. “I can’t assist however assume how a lot America would possibly profit from this profoundly pleasurable expression of African and Caribbean foodways,” Aussie critic Besha Rodell fawned in a 2018 Instances assessment.
Nonetheless, Carmichael, who was born in Barbados, arrives again in New York with a comparatively low profile among the many metropolis’s diners and a plan to focus Kabawa on the cooking of the Caribbean. He was impressed by phrases and phrases from the indigenous Kalinago language for the restaurant’s title.
Clockwise from top-left: Quick rib patty with conch and bone marrow, a patty with duck and foie gras, and pig-head souse with cucumber.
Photograph: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
The restaurant shall be break up into two components: the principle eating room will supply a three-course prix fixe menu may characteristic renditions of rasta pasta, curry goat, or jerk duck, and — opening first — Bar Kabawa, a “daiquiri and wine” room with raw-bar picks and a full patty program. “As a lot as this can be a enterprise, and no one understands that higher than me, it’s additionally an outlet to share,” says Carmichael. His patty dough is a hybrid of flaky Jamaican and laminated Haitian types, and he’ll supply them baked or fried with fillings that embody quick rib with conch and bone marrow, duck with foie gras, and eggplant-tomato. To spherical out the bar menu, Carmichael is engaged on a dish with the Haitian slaw often known as pikliz and pig’s-head souse, a play on the staple, which is extra usually made with long-simmered, vinegar-spiked pig’s ft. “That one’s actual Bajan,” says Carmichael.
“We would like this to be a platform for Paul,” says Momofuku CEO Marguerite Zabar Mariscal. “I don’t simply imply in Further Place — if in ten years there’s Paul’s Patties, too, it’s like, nice.”
Nonetheless, the chef has little interest in competing with town’s quite a few cuchifritos and roti retailers; that is simply his likelihood to point out his imaginative and prescient for a method of cooking that has solely lately began to achieve traction inside the world of nice eating — and that he wasn’t in a position to absolutely discover the final time he cooked on this nation. “In Australia, I let unfastened and simply saved honing it,” he says. “Now, we’re going to forge our personal mind-set and making folks really feel. We would like our personal kind of identification right here.”
Shaved ice for a cocktail. The bar will put an emphasis on daiquiris.
Photograph: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
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For those who favor to learn in print, you may also discover this text within the January 27, 2025, situation of
New York Journal.
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For those who favor to learn in print, you may also discover this text within the January 27, 2025, situation of
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