The tamarind pod is dusky brown, light and rough to the touch. Press it with your thumbs or give it a twist. When it cracks, peel off the shell, pull out the veins and free the pulp — sticky as figs and more sweet than sour, because the fruit’s so ripe. Still you’ll pucker a little, working your tongue around the seeds.
Presented at Kabawa before dessert, this might be the loveliest palate cleanser in town. It’s all the lovelier for being a little messy, in keeping with the restaurant’s ethos: fine dining, but without the pomp.
Kabawa opened in late March in the space once home to the half-bonkers, half-sublime Momofuku Ko, on a dead-end alley off East First Street named, as if with a shrug, Extra Place. In 1977, the address was sufficiently down-and-out to be the backdrop for a Ramones album cover; if you sneaked out the back of the punk club CBGB, this was where you wound up.
The chef, Paul Carmichael, grew up in Barbados and worked his way through New York City kitchens before taking the lead at Momofuku Seiobo in Sydney, Australia, the farthest-flung outpost of the Momofuku empire. It closed in 2021 — luckily for New Yorkers, for now Mr. Carmichael’s superlative cooking and ambitious vision of Caribbean cuisine have been returned to us.
The menu promises three courses for $145, which in a city of tasting menus priced well north of $300 seems almost reasonable. Especially since that math doesn’t include the elaborate overture of chutneys and breads, like bammy, Jamaican cassava cakes compacted into cubes of bubbled gold, and a crumpled kerchief of paratha that people in Trinidad and Tobago call buss up shut, because it’s jabbed with spatulas on the griddle until it looks like a busted-up shirt. The tenderness and tang come from buttermilk in the dough and glossings of cultured butter.
For the meal proper, you’d be wise to choose the pepper shrimp, which in Jamaica you’d find in plastic bags at roadside shacks. Here they’re Royal Red shrimp from deep, icy waters off Montauk, served raw, the flesh slippery with a delicate snap and as sweet as a lobster’s. Dots of fermented Scotch bonnet float in the oil below, holding their shape like hot teardrops, biding their time to explode.
Mr. Carmichael is a master of texture, turning cassava dumplings into dainty orbs that belie the root’s starchiness. An improbably airy breadfruit tostón bears supple octopus and a lashing of dog sauce, or sauce chien, which has the bracing effect of a vinaigrette in bloom, with its bright crush of lime, habaneros, chives and thyme.
Salt cod in translucent papery scraps adorns planks of darkly caramelized plantain, but the star of the plate is the virtuosic scramble of eggs, as creamy as custard. Disappointing, then, that they’re given a cursory dollop of caviar. Would the dish be too straightforward without?
A similar question haunts the entire menu: How do you introduce a cuisine at this price point to diners who may know it only in its cheaper, more streetwise forms — who may not recognize its value?
The answer at Kabawa is to show it both as it is and as it can be, without apology or compromise. Not in defiance but in welcome, and with the understanding that none of this should be taken as definitive. It is Caribbean food filtered through one man’s memory and imagination. That is, Mr. Carmichael’s food.
In an inversion of blaff, traditionally fish poached in a lime-perfumed broth, fatty white cobia is glazed with tamarind and roasted into a sugary sweat. It’s an enemies-to-lovers story, sweet versus sour, in a shimmery broth scented with bay leaves. Goat shoulder, succulent and lean, tastes of patience and the slow unlatching of muscles, a dishevelment in progress. The great côtes de boeuf and porterhouses of New York have nothing on this. The sauce is ecstatically hot, a meld of confit habaneros, with their pineapple-y musk, and dried scallops coaxed back to life with a bit of rum.
Only the hungriest should dare the chuletas can-can, a monument of pork: rib, loin and belly, crisped and ruffled like a garter at the Moulin Rouge. The first bite is salt and shatter — a thrill, though after that every bite tastes the same.
By the end of this abundance — as one server told me, “Chef likes to feed people” — you may crave the soft landing of the Jamaican Christmastime dessert called matrimony, a tumble of grapefruit and pomelos soothed by condensed milk in the form of both curd and ice cream. But rally for the coconut turnover, a full nine-inch buttery loaf so warm it seems to breathe, with a lode of shredded, spiced coconut and coconut cream cheese frosting piped thick.
Bar Kabawa next door is smaller and more clamorous. Daiquiris are poured over ice shaved diaphanously fine, closer to frozen mist than liquid. The food is exalted here, too: Solomon Gundy, a voluptuous dip of smoked herring, gets a boost of bottarga and a glassine seal of charred sugar. The patties embrace the best of both Haiti and Jamaica, generously packed, shining with butter and leaving a thousand shards in their wake, so you have to shake out your dress when you stand up.
Kabawa is more of a theater, with the kitchen like a stage and diners at a counter on three sides. The cooks, in tie-dye aprons, move with locked-in efficiency. The occasional chorus of “heard” suggests an alternate-universe episode of “The Bear” in which people might actually achieve happiness. At times the servers brim over with enthusiasm, impatient to share their own first encounter with a beloved dish. Listen.
Mr. Carmichael is intent on creating a complete world. In one restroom you hear the chirps of coquí frogs from Puerto Rico’s El Yunque rainforest; in another, a speech by the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, calling for solidarity. This did not stop a cook and a guest, both from the Caribbean, from sparring gently on a recent evening over the stereotypes of their respective origins, before finding common cause in enumerating each gradation in character across the islands.
It made me laugh — I come from an island, too, in a different ocean — and think of how rare it is, in our rancorous age, to find a gathering place like this, where there are no outsiders, because everyone is invited in. Where you can sit side by side with strangers for a few hours in peace. Even joy.
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Ligaya Mishan is a chief restaurant critic for The Times.
The post The Caribbean, Filtered Through One Chef’s Imagination appeared first on New York Times.
