Babu

Great food in the Village

Babu

99 Macdougal St. (near Bleecker St.)

Greenwich Village

Indian food from Bengal in New York City

With some exceptions, Indian restaurants in this country often attempt at evoking the grandeur of their Persian or British rulers. However- if you are tired of seeking Heat and Dust Chicken or Lamb Shah Jahani, and want to bypass visions of empire through these hackneyed culinary mutations on menus, go visit Babu.

Tuked away on MacDougal Street, in a little entrance below the more popular Kati-Roll company, sits Babu, an authentic Bengali restaurant. Meticulously prepared, true to form Bengali food. Expect a menu that even the savvy ethnic eating New Yorker will find unfamiliar. There is street food that reminds you of Nizam’s and Anadi Cabin in Calcutta. Finely sliced potato fries in little deflocculated grassy heaps, mutton kebabs and chutneys with fresh ground spices that bubble with taste on your tongue. There are arcane, complicated dishes like Macher Paturi and Daab Chingri, traditional food from generations past. This latter dish was lovingly cooked—shrimp steamed in a gentle curry sealed inside the moist softness of a green coconut.

Bengali food, unlike its artists and its scientists, have never really caught on outside of India. Within India, the Bengali’s love of fish, sweets, and lack of gender in his grammar are legendary. In the past decade upscale restaurants serving Bengali cuisine have sprung up starting from Kolkata and moving outwards. Babu seems to be an international extension of this trend.

The restaurant sits below street level, in a small dining room with surprisingly authentic décor imitating a small room in a suburban, or rural house. I am not usually a fan of the décor at Indian restaurants but this one is lovingly done, down to the little candles and the soot marks on the walls from the the combustion of oil lamps. The dishes took a while to arrive, but there is a reason. The items on the menu represent complicated fare, sufficiently varied from one another that they cannot be whipped up from a common base or curry. Mistrust the restaurant that whips up your Hyderabadi and Amritsari dishes in minutes—you will find that these deft cross-country culinary leaps can taste suspiciously similar. The food was good, and it was authentic. The daal had that slight hint of sweetness that you look for, the dry cooked Kosha Mangsho (meat, in this case mutton) had tender pieces of meat on the bone bathed in just the right amount of sauce that you can scoop up with your luchi (a puffed bread). The chilli chicken is a tribute to the Indo chinese food that you get from Tangra, an ethnic chinese suburb of Calcutta. The spiciness was a bit on the plus side, according to this reviewer, and he would probably ask it to be toned down the next time he visited. There could be a few more vegetarian dishes on the menu.

Babu, started this year by the owners of the Kati roll company, appears to be a labor of love with a painstaking effort at authenticity. If you are looking for a different kind of Indian food, a visit to this low key, little gem may be worth it.

Post-script added March 16, 2007: alas Babu did not survive, much to the dismay of this writer. It had to close shop, while the attached (and related) Kati Roll Company continues to do business. Calcutta food is just catching the wind in India, and Babu--while it favorably compares to similar restaurants in India--was, like Alauddin Khalji, ahead of its time for New York.