Four windows at the bottom of a brick building in the East Village used to entice passers-by, with string lights and glowing chili peppers as far as the eye could see.
Competitive hosts would flank the entryways to three restaurants there, calling out to customers. It was part of the charm: Over decades the South Asian restaurants attracted locals, tourists, Instagram influencers and even celebrities.
Today, a red rolldown door covers the lower two windows of what was once the restaurant Royal Bangladesh. A curtain has been drawn across another, where Milon stood. On the second floor, to the right side, just one restaurant, Panna II, has kept its lights on.
The glowing storefronts were a sign of a once-vibrant South Asian community, centered around a block known as Little India or Curry Row where there were dozens of Desi restaurants. Starting out as cheap eats — where you could get a plate of chicken curry and a samosa for $5 during lunchtime — they became neighborhood standbys and even social media-famous hot spots with celebrity sightings. Now, decades after they opened, only one of the storefronts remains.
Boshir Khan, 49, the Bangladeshi-born owner of Panna II, which sits on First Avenue just around the corner from the old Curry Row, finds it bittersweet to be the last man standing at the vibrant entryway. He was still greeting visitors on a recent Friday in November, though with less urgency.
“Sometimes I’m glad — it’s less stress,” he said, recalling the vigorous competition with his neighbors.
Open since the 1980s, the three restaurants had survived waves of gentrification, economic hardship and the dissolution of a once-concentrated South Asian community. But the financial strain of pandemic shutdowns and rising prices were the death knell to many local businesses.
Mr. Khan greets every guest at Panna II, answers every phone call and serves the tables alongside his wait staff. Despite plenty of publicity over the years, people unfamiliar with the restaurant’s year-round festive glow still walk by, their necks craned as they appear dazzled by the decorations.
“Is this for Diwali?” one customer asked Mr. Khan as she walked through Panna II’s door. “Is it always like this?”
Mr. Khan simply nodded, then seated her at a table in the middle of the restaurant’s canopy of lights.
Panna II and its two neighboring restaurants were not an anomaly in the 1980s and early ’90s: Dozens of restaurants that filled Sixth Street between First and Second Avenues and nearby streets were decorated in similar fashion and grouped together broadly as Indian food options.
That label was somewhat of a misnomer. In the late 1960s, immigrants largely from the Sylhet region in what is now Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) started moving to New York — one by one, family members, cousins and neighbors following one another to an area that was still considered part of the Lower East Side.
They opened new restaurants, serving North Indian fare (biryani, saag) instead of Bengali food (which includes more seafood) because it was more recognizable to the neighborhood’s countercultural community. They turned the block into a little Sylhet, under the guise of Indian cuisine. Soon enough, the neighborhood’s hippies and artists, longstanding Ukrainian, Jewish and Puerto Rican communities, and new Bangladeshi residents came together in what was becoming the East Village.
By the late ’80s, nearly every vendor and restaurant on the block sold curries and rotis.
When Suketu Mehta was a student at N.Y.U. in the ’80s, he often dined at Milon. Mr. Mehta, now an author and associate professor of journalism at N.Y.U. focused on migration and cities, called the restaurants a “service to people who were living in the village at the time who weren’t wealthy.”
“For under $5, we could have a large and nourishing, if not entirely gourmet, lunch,” Mr. Mehta said, adding that the B.Y.O.B. policy was also a selling point for college students.
The restaurants each had a unique flair: Some were dressed in lights, like Panna II and its neighbors, while others had fabrics on the walls. Mr. Mehta said he remembered one restaurant hired a sitar player.
“He wasn’t very good,” Mr. Mehta added.
The restaurants brought in crowds excited to try a cuisine that was new to them.
Mr. Khan, who grew up around the corner from his restaurant, began working shifts at Panna II in the sixth grade with his father.
He remembers the area being “rough” in the ’80s.
“After 5 o’clock, you can’t even go out,” he said. “But I miss the old neighborhood.”
When Mr. Khan was in grade school, the East Village was still affordable for working-class families, although it was just beginning to gentrify, with more white-collar workers.
In the late ’90s, as demand for the East Village’s Indian food waned and rents skyrocketed, The New York Times wrote of financial turmoil and “bad days on Sixth Street.”
South Asian food, once rare, was being served across boroughs. Business owners facing financial strain and growing competition moved out.
“I’m missing all my friends — all the customers that used to come,” said Abdul Patwary, the owner of the spice and grocery store Duals Natural, which opened in 1989 and is one of the few remaining businesses from the era.
At 93 First Avenue, the competition began to heat up. The proprietors of Panna II and Milon, Mr. Khan and Olid Ahmed, each claimed to come up with the idea of hanging up string lights first. “This place was the original,” Mr. Khan said, a claim Mr. Ahmed also made in a 1999 Times article. (He could not be reached for this article.)
Despite their fierce competition — and maybe because of it — Milon, Panna II and Royal Bangladesh managed to survive the ’90s and into the 2000s.
The social media era brought a boost — the colorful backgrounds of Panna II and Milon seemed tailor-made for Instagram. Students, and then tourists, flocked to the spot.
“In high school, it would be like cool girls would have their birthday parties here and post photos on Facebook with the lights in the background,” said Amara Leonard, 27, who grew up in New Jersey and visited Panna II last month for the first time in years.
The three restaurants hosted celebrities from Vanessa Hudgens to Chrissy Teigen and John Legend. A picture of the model Emily Ratajkowski with Mr. Khan from her birthday party in 2018 hangs on a wall in the restaurant alongside pictures of other famous visitors.
But as suddenly as business appeared to boom again, it stopped. The coronavirus pandemic forced all three restaurants to temporarily shut down. Milon closed permanently months later.
Royal Bangladesh tried to make a comeback, but ultimately closed its doors in 2022.
Mr. Khan closed his restaurant for a year after he was hospitalized with Covid. Once he reopened, he took over the lease for Milon’s space, but gave it up this fall when the rent jumped to $8,000 per month. (He took over Milon’s website and phone number to sell takeout.) As the blog EV Grieve wrote when it broke the news: “And then there was one.”
Some saw it as the end of the long and winding arc of Little India.
“It’s really useful to look at the dusk of the Bangladeshi-Indian restaurants as a metaphor for what’s happened to the East Village in general,” Mr. Mehta said. “There’s something that’s lost.”
He added, “These places have a special hold on our heart.”
For the Panna II space, Mr. Khan said he now pays $6,000 a month — plus $1,500 to $2,000 for those lights. But he has kept almost every meal on the menu below $20.
Now, a search for “Little India” brings up other neighborhoods, like Jackson Heights, Queens, and the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, known as Curry Hill.
There are other South Asian restaurants in the area, including the Sri Lankan restaurant Sigiri next door, but not ones from the ’80s. The last were closed during the pandemic. Even Duals Natural, the longstanding spice shop, has expanded its spice offerings to other cuisines.
Mr. Khan said the empty restaurant spaces next to him might be turned into apartments. His own space will keep its many lights on for now.
Mr. Khan does not often think of retirement, but he knows he wants to keep the business in the family.
“This was my first job,” Mr. Khan said, recalling those childhood shifts with his father, who passed away three years ago. “Hopefully, this is my last job.”
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