During one of my visits, after I asked about the provenance of the kitchen’s jewel-like tropical fruits, Carmichael mentioned that it took him a while to earn the trust of Big Mac, the owner of Labay Market, in Brooklyn, one of the city’s finest sources for Caribbean imports, including produce from a sixty-acre farm in Grenada owned by Big Mac’s family. “I had to prove that I was for real,” Carmichael said, with a smile. Later on in the same meal, emboldened by rum, I asked him why Kabawa didn’t serve any jerk. (The menu’s boudin-like “jerk” duck sausage is styled with scare quotes.) He explained that he hasn’t been able to get his hands on pimento wood, whose sweet, herbaceous smoke gives the dish its characteristic flavor. Then he added, growing serious, that the famous Jamaican cooking style gets enough attention already. “I love jerk; I’m writing a book about jerk,” he said. “But everyone knows jerk. I put it on the menu, everyone’s going to order it, and I won’t get to show you everything else from all the other islands.”
For all its thoughtful flourishes, a meal at Kabawa feels easygoing and joyous. The kitchenside seating lacks the prayer-rail worshipfulness of many chef’s counters; the evening unfolds at a considered pace, providing time enough to savor the details, but not so long as to leave you antsy. To begin, there’s an Indo-Caribbean “bread course” of a chewy paratha and a thick, chickpea-flour-dusted roti, alongside an array of dips and spreads including an eggplant chutney cooked with tamarind, curried chickpeas reminiscent of Trinidad’s famous doubles, and a snow-white wodge of cultured butter in a pool of piquant yellow-pepper jelly. The main courses include black bass with rich coconut curry, the fish’s skin chicharron-crisp; an elegant brick of shredded goat meat in a fiery-hot sauce Creole; and a terrifyingly enormous chuletas can can, a cudgel-like Puerto Rican cut of pork that encompasses belly, rib, and loin, with scored skin flaring out like the skirt of a dancer mid-twirl. (It serves two, and carries a seventy-five-dollar supplemental charge; I haven’t yet worked up the nerve to try it.) The entrées are served with family-style sides including a bowl of silken beans and another of chewy long-grain rice, plus a tangle of frilly salad greens and a slice of starchy Japanese sweet potato swimming in pineapple vinegar. Between the savory courses and dessert, a cook might come by to present a palate-cleansing bite of fruit, such as whole sweet tamarinds in their pods, or sticky white trapezoids of soursop.
Though there’s no shortage of high points at Kabawa—among them a rainbow-sprinkle-studded baton of flan so dense it verges on cheesecake—the restaurant’s success lies less in the strength of any individual dish than in the ebullient sum of its parts. (Still, I must adamantly recommend a scotch-bonnet fried chicken that was on offer during one of my visits, and hopefully will return soon.) The over-all electricity of the restaurant—its confidence, its clarity, its idiosyncrasy—feels true to the early years of Momofuku, and makes Kabawa a tropical bulwark against New York’s recent retreat into the anesthetizing comforts of French food and steak houses. The kitchen is still working some things out: a coconut turnover, an ultra-sweet Barbadian dessert listed on the menu for two, is bread-loaf-sized and more properly feeds four or five; a green-banana pastel covered in a variety of sautéed mushrooms is just sort of boring. But for me, at least, an almost euphoric pleasure comes from simply being there, pumped full of life by the colors and the smells, by watching Carmichael and his chef de cuisine, Max Guillaume, intently plate a dish of cassava dumplings in spicy red gravy, by conspiring with a server to get one of the terrific off-menu piña coladas sent over from Bar Kabawa next door. They might ferry over some patties, too, if you ask nicely, but it’s worth going over there yourself, some different night, when you’re in the mood for impeccable daiquiris and beguilingly punchy snacks. If you seem to be especially enjoying yourself—and I can’t see how you wouldn’t be—Carmichael might even ring the bell. ♦
Dining and Cooking