I still have five or so reports from Seoul/Busan to come. But before I get to the next of those, here’s the first report from my recent short trip to New Jersey/New York in mid-May. I was there for just a few nights. I had a packed schedule but managed to see friends for meals on each day. The first of those was dinner in New York City a few hours after arrival. I met an old high school friend at an Indian restaurant in the West Village. I had wanted to try one of the city’s better Indian restaurants. We’d originally hoped to eat at Dhamaka but they seemed to be closed for a private event—at any rate not a single table was available all evening. As we batted around options, location and timing became the chief constraints. Which is how we ended up at Bombay Bistro on Cornelia St., a restaurant I’d never previously heard of and he’d never been to, and which, as far as I could tell from their website, was a regulation curry house—a genre of Indian restaurant in the US that I am usually not interested in. Here’s how it went.
Speaking of Bombay Bistro’s website, its brief “About Us” section presents quite the take on British colonialism in India. I will leave it to you to experience that for yourself. I had also noted from it that their location was once home to “Caffe Cino- the birthplace of Off-Off Broadway Theater” and also Mario Batali’s Pó. Entering the restaurant and taking in their idiosyncratic decor—hardly a standard curry house aesthetic—I had assumed it had been passed down by those previous occupants. But now, looking at a picture of Pó in this Eater article announcing its closing, I see that’s not the case. Quite a bit of money must have been put into renovating the place. If you were to arrive, as I did, not too long after opening on a weeknight, you might wonder if that investment has been repaid or how they pay the (presumably very high) rent. I was the only occupant for quite some time. But then the (not-very large) restaurant began to fill up and by the time we left at around 8 pm it had been packed to the gills for a while, with plenty of delivery runners waiting outside for pickup as well. If they do that well on Tuesday nights they must be doing well on the whole. (By the way, if this evening was a representative sample, their audience is predominantly non-South Asian. Other than the servers, my friend and I may have been the only desis there that evening.)
What’s bringing the people in? Not the promise of regional or street food novelty that has raised the cultural cachet of a number of Indian restaurants in NYC in recent years. As noted above, this is very much a curry house menu. Yes, there’s paani puri among the starters and crispy okra (with truffle oil for some reason) among the veg sides but that’s as far as they go in the direction of trendiness. The menu otherwise is comprised of the curry house all-stars: seekh kababs, tandoori chicken, roghan josh, chicken tikka masala, korma, vindaloo, biryani, dal makhani, palak paneer, chana masala. Cannily, they don’t serve very much else. It’s an edited menu, which presumably allows the kitchen to focus. The other feature of the menu which may be key to their success—as far as I could make out every table other than ours was ordering this—is a prix fixe option that allows you to select an entree, a bread, a side dish and a cocktail or glass of wine for $47, which is surely a very good price in the city.
My friend and I did not, however, opt for this. We had established a good rapport with the two very pleasant Nepali servers (having more or less grown up in Darjeeling, my friend speaks fluent Nepali despite being from Bangladesh) and we asked them for some recommendations. Accordingly, we began with kababs. We asked if instead of getting either the seekh kababs or the chicken tikkas it might be possible to get a half-and-half order and they readily agreed. Both kababs were really quite good. To follow we got the roghan josh, the dal makhani, the Bombay aloo baingan, the crispy okra, raita and some naans and tandoori rotis. Before ordering the roghan josh I asked our server to check with the kitchen if they put any cream in it. No, she came back and said, the chef says it’s a proper roghan josh, with yogurt only. Well, it wasn’t a proper roghan josh but taken on its own terms it was a tasty lamb curry. The dal, however, was excellent. I’m not sure what was Bombay about the Bombay aloo baingan but it was tasty enough. The okra, however, disappeared completely into the too-heavily applied batter (and the truffle oil was not palpable). The breads and the raita were quite good.
To close, we each got an order of gulab jamuns, which were acceptable. And, oh yes, we each had a Taj Mahal beer with our meal. I should note that their menu features almost as many cocktails as food. I was curious but decided to stick with beer. If anyone knows what the standard of their cocktails is, please write in below.
For a look at the restaurant and what we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see how much it all cost and to see what’s coming next (from NY/NJ and elsewhere).
I have to say that while this meal did not make me curious about trying more curry houses, in New York or elsewhere, the meal was not bad. If that is the kind of Indian food you are drawn to, you’ll find a pretty decent rendition of it here. I don’t know that I would make any other claims for it.
With tax and tip the cost came to just about $82/head. Which is not cheap but is also not very expensive in this part of New York. It is, however, quite a lot more expensive than the next desi meal I ate on this trip, which involved Gujarati thalis in Edison, NJ. More on that next week. Before that I’ll have another Seoul report this weekend and another Twin Cities report on Tuesday.