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Momofuku Swaps Pork Buns For Beef Patties
Photo: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
At the peak of its sprawl, Momofuku’s empire comprised 13 restaurants across six cities on two continents. There were fast-casual satellites (Milk Bar, Fuku, Bāng Bar) and a companion magazine. Tying it all together was David Chang’s bro-chef sensibility, a talent for blending East Asian techniques and American comfort food that has now been distilled into a grocery line of instant ramen and condiments, Chang’s Ringer podcast, and his Netflix cooking show. At the same time, the number of full-service Momofuku restaurants dwindled to four. But the most recent to close, Ko, is turning into the company’s first entirely new restaurant since 2019: Kabawa is a reimagining of what a Momofuku restaurant can be — I didn’t see one peach illustration as I walked through recently — with chef Paul Carmichael stepping in to lead.
Carmichael has actually spent more than a decade in the Momo orbit. He was the executive chef at Má Pêche in midtown and ran Seiobo, the company’s restaurant in Sydney, Australia, where his 14-course tasting menus included dishes such as charred breadfruit with butter and cassava gnocchi with mud crab. “I can’t help but think how much America might benefit from this profoundly pleasurable expression of African and Caribbean foodways,” Aussie critic Besha Rodell fawned in a 2018 Times review.
Still, Carmichael, who was born in Barbados, arrives back in New York with a relatively low profile among the city’s diners and a plan to focus Kabawa on the cooking of the Caribbean. He was inspired by words and phrases from the indigenous Kalinago language for the restaurant’s name.
Photo: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
The restaurant will be split into two parts: the main dining room will offer a three-course prix fixe menu could feature renditions of rasta pasta, curry goat, or jerk duck, and — opening first — Bar Kabawa, a “daiquiri and wine” room with raw-bar picks and a full patty program. “As much as this is a business, and nobody understands that better than me, it’s also an outlet to share,” says Carmichael. His patty dough is a hybrid of flaky Jamaican and laminated Haitian styles, and he’ll offer them baked or fried with fillings that include short rib with conch and bone marrow, duck with foie gras, and eggplant-tomato. To round out the bar menu, Carmichael is working on a dish with the Haitian slaw known as pikliz and pig’s-head souse, a play on the staple, which is more often made with long-simmered, vinegar-spiked pig’s feet. “That one’s real Bajan,” says Carmichael.
“We want this to be a platform for Paul,” says Momofuku CEO Marguerite Zabar Mariscal. “I don’t just mean in Extra Place — if in ten years there’s Paul’s Patties, too, it’s like, great.”
Still, the chef has no interest in competing with the city’s numerous cuchifritos and roti shops; this is just his chance to show his vision for a style of cooking that has only recently started to gain traction within the world of fine dining — and that he wasn’t able to fully explore the last time he cooked in this country. “In Australia, I let loose and just kept honing it,” he says. “Now, we’re going to forge our own way of thinking and making people feel. We want our own sort of identity here.”
Photo: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
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