The late-night visit to Kabab King was ostensibly for a campaign interview. But the minute the food hit the table, Zohran Mamdani became lost in the chicken biryani in front of him, digging into the plate with gleeful abandon.
After a few minutes, a light dawned. He looked up and apologized for not sharing. “Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “As you can tell, I’m hungry.”
He continued to apologize throughout the meal at Kabab King, a 24-hour restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens, that he’s been visiting since high school. The next day, a campaign aide texted her regrets.
The Democratic nominee and front-runner for mayor, Mr. Mamdani is keenly aware how attentive New Yorkers are to how their politicians interact with food, and how judgmental they can be. The former mayor Bill de Blasio was mocked in 2014 for eating a pizza with a fork and knife rather than folded and by hand in the New York style. The current mayor, Eric Adams, faced a similar scolding when he was spotted eating fish after professing to follow a plant-based diet.
But no mayoral candidate’s relationship to food has been more scrutinized or showcased than Mr. Mamdani’s, often by his own choice. A devotee of delis and bodegas who once filmed a music video at Kabab King under the rap moniker “Mr. Cardamom,” he is harnessing food as both campaign tool and policy plank.
Mr. Mamdani — at 33, suddenly one of the most famous faces in American politics — has proposed opening a city-owned grocery store in each of the five boroughs to make ingredients more affordable, and repealing some of the laws and regulations that have curtailed street vending. He has held news conferences at his favorite restaurants, and conducted many press interviews inside them.
And the social-media blitz that has been widely credited for his success often focuses on food. In posts with hundreds of thousands of views, he has framed his central message — making the city more affordable — around specific culinary benchmarks like the rising price of halal chicken and rice, and used Bengali sweets as props to explain ranked-choice voting.
The way Mr. Mamdani references food at “the personal level and the policy level — and his skill in doing it is probably unusual, if not completely new,” said Grant Davis Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University.
Others worry that those skills won’t translate to political leadership. “The mechanics of running the city government and the city are far different than the feel-good images you can make on social media,” said Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a think tank run by moderate Democrats. “Governing as an influencer will not work. People need results.”
Food has been a staple of retail politics for as long as candidates have gnawed on pork ribs at state fairs to display a common touch. And as inflation and healthy eating have become hot issues, it’s commonplace to hear campaign speeches about egg prices or artificial food dyes.
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who is running as an independent and posts the occasional grip-and-grin photo from a dining room, has proposed subsidies for low-income New Yorkers who don’t qualify for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. Curtis Sliwa, the Republican, said through a spokeswoman that he would increase the number of businesses that accept SNAP benefits, and “raise school meal standards with fresher, better options.” And before he withdrew from the race on Sunday, Mr. Adams made plant-based meals a priority in the city’s schools and jails.
But Mr. Mamdani leverages food in a different, more powerful way, said Adam Bozzi, a Washington-based Democratic political strategist who is not involved with any of the mayoral campaigns.
Food is “part of his language to make his politics really accessible,” Mr. Bozzi said. It’s a background character in his videos, meant to make the setting — and him — feel familiar to voters. “Which is different from the actual food being the event, like ‘I am eating fried butter or the cheesesteak.’ That feels a little more contrived.”
Mr. Mamdani’s focus on street foods and inexpensive neighborhood restaurants serves a bigger strategy: portraying himself as a relatable everyman. And while dropping in at restaurants is nothing new for New York politicians, what is different is the way Mr. Mamdani interacts with the owners, said Basil Smikle Jr., a former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party who is now a professor at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies.
“He uses food in the way that an influencer might,” said Dr. Smikle, “versus a Kamala or JD Vance, where it is a little more structured, a little more organized, a little more scripted. He seems more comfortable engaging.”
Mr. Mamdani says he never set out to build his campaign around food.
Eating has simply been “the way that I understood myself as a New Yorker,” he said. “So many of these moments in my life were ones that I could not separate from food,” like the cardamom chai and a savory snack mix called chevdo that his mother (the filmmaker Mira Nair) served him when the family lived in Morningside Heights, or the momos he later ate for lunch in Jackson Heights when working as a housing counselor.
When he ran for his State Assembly seat during the early months of the pandemic in 2020, Mr. Mamdani turned his campaign office into a food pantry.
He often talks to people about what they eat — like how the classic $1 New York pizza slice no longer costs a dollar. “Food is a very quick way to understand the rising cost of living in the city, because people remember the cost of staples in their lives,” he said.
But if food can make a connection with voters, it can just as easily alienate them. Mr. Mamdani experienced a minor food scandal in March, when he posted a photo of himself on X eating a burrito on the subway. Scores of commenters denounced that as unhygienic and disrespectful to fellow passengers.
He responded with a video in which he said, “I hear you, I see you and if you’re a burrito on the Q train, I eat you.”
He laughed as he recalled the furor. “There were real people who said the campaign was over,” he said. “I was like, ‘Just take a breath!’”
The Wi-Fi network for his campaign office is now called “BurritoGate.”
That burrito also signals the types of restaurants where Mr. Mamdani campaigns. When he announced he would reduce fines and fees for small businesses, he did so at the bodega in the Flatiron district where he used to buy his morning egg sandwich. He had lunch and posted a photo with Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at Sami’s Kabab House, an Afghan restaurant also in Astoria where he is a regular.
“He respects us and treats us like Michelin-star restaurants,” said Ali Zaman, who runs the Astoria cafe Little Flower — one of the stops on a scavenger hunt the campaign recently led around the city. (The cafe’s name also evokes Mr. Mamdani’s favorite mayor, Fiorello H. LaGuardia.)
While eating at Kabab King, Mr. Mamdani acknowledged that it wasn’t a classic stop for politicians. “Barack, come to Kabab King!” he shouted, then quickly corrected himself: “President Obama, come to Kabab King!”
Visits like this have become more difficult for the candidate. At the start of the year, he could freely run out to grab a smoothie or sit in his favorite Yemeni coffee shops in Astoria, where he lives with his wife, the animator and illustrator Rama Duwaji.
Today, the image of accessibility that helped propel his candidacy is much harder to convey when he is flanked by security and entering restaurants through a back door.
“If all you do is sit in a detailed car and you’re going around New York City, your world will start to narrow,” he said. He still goes out to eat, but often dines in quiet back areas, and faces away from guests so he’s not immediately recognized.
There was little chance of that at Kabab King, where Mr. Mamdani was trying to finish his biryani. Eventually, he gave up and asked for a doggy bag.
Strolling down 73rd Street, toting a disposable cup of chai and a plastic bag of leftovers, he carried himself like any other Queens resident heading home after a long night. Except for the guards surrounding him, the black S.U.V. he boarded and the crush of people who followed.
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Priya Krishna is a reporter in the Food section of The Times.
The post How Zohran Mamdani Built a Campaign Around Food appeared first on New York Times.
