Babu, a new restaurant in Greenwich Village which serves food from Calcutta, apparently made up its menu according to Black Sheep’s hip-hop classic, ‘The Choice Is Yours.’ The formerly price-list-free restaurant sits below Kati Roll Co. and is by the same owner (thanks, Turbanhead):
… the menu came without prices. Instead, guests were invited to eat, enjoy, and then, at the end of the meal, pay what they thought it was worth. “I’d rather work out the kinks in the kitchen first,” Payal Saha, the restaurant’s owner, explained the other day, sitting at a corner table of Babu, which was about a quarter full of couples quietly eating and mentally calculating the value of their experience…
Payments range from generous (foodies) to parsimonious (Midwesterners):
“We had one couple who paid two hundred bucks for an eighty-dollar meal,” Saha said… “We talked to some people before sending them their check, asking if they would pay fifty dollars for this meal,” Jung said. “The people mostly said yes, except for one couple from Minneapolis. They were shocked at that price.”
In classic desi fashion, our fine young cannibals took advantage of the price-free policy:
A rowdy group of ten young Indians walked in one Friday evening and occupied the restaurant’s large central table. Their response to no prices was to leave no money; they didn’t even tip the wait staff.
But all good things must come to an end on the credit card slip, top copy:
A few weeks ago, prices were finally written into the menu: a three-course meal with wine comes to about fifty dollars a head.
The New Yorker also covered M.I.A. recently — is Eustace Tilly crushing on cumin?
Thanks to you guys for the tip on Babu, I and a couple of my friends checked out this new restaurant, and it was a wonderful experience. The food was great (authentic, just the right amount of spicyness, and extremely flavorful). Many restaurants, get it wrong by making desi food too spicy or less spicy, I believe Babu has got it right. 🙂 A definite top of the list for another few months (weeks ?? ), before word spreads out and the wait times increases to evil heights …
If you dont frequent MacDougal that often, then this place might escape your vision at a first glance on the street, but look no-where else, its right below Kati-Rolls and Hummus.
Btw, also checked out the new place Hummus. The menu doesn’t depart far from the name of the place, it has only four items with three of them being different types of Hummus. But its definetly worth trying, with soft Pita and delicious chick peas, the experience can be magical for a weekend afternoon snack. Also check out the Turkish Coffee while you are there ..
Who’s the Black Sheep?
Man, the SMers really dig that song!
-D
Deepa- NY based early 90s hip hop duo, something ala De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest. (in fact they were all part of the “Native Tongue Family” of artists) Come on yaar– “you can get with this or you can get with that…”
no? they weren’t that big…
D- never mind. I jumped too quickly. You in the know 🙂
weren’t that big? Maybe not the whole corpus (in fact i don’t even know another song by black sheep), but out in the suburbs, at least, we all know:
engine, engine number 9, on the new york transit line, if my train goes off the tracks… pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.
is this the only restaurant opened up recently by the owner of kati roll? i ran into someone who told me that a.r. rahman had been spotted inside “the restaurant opened up recently by the owner of kati roll” which i thought was curry, or whatever it’s called.
-s
Just a little bit of nitpicking. From the article that was linked, it seems that Babu does not style itself as a Bengali restaurant, rather it is more about the food of Calcutta, a sort of smorgasbord of different cuisines from the city. The two are not synonymous, though it seems Babu does serve a few Bengali dishes. What can one possibly call such places? Calcutta Potpourri?
Thanks, fixed.