The New York Times :
One Monday afternoon in December, Nur-E Gulshan Rahman was perched on a hot-pink step stool, her body hunched over a boti, a steel cutting instrument she bought back in her native Bangladesh. Her face was inexplicably free of sweat as she sliced bulky calabazas into small diamonds.
A large knife might suffice for other cooks when it came to that task. But not for Gulshan, who prefers the boti, its blade shaped like a viper’s fang.
“Too hard,” she said when asked why she doesn’t use a chef’s knife. “We are not used to cutting pumpkin with the knife in Bangladesh.”
Gulshan, 61, is the chef and sole cook at Korai Kitchen, the Jersey City restaurant she opened in February with her youngest daughter, Nur-E Farhana Rahman, 31. Farhana Rahman handles business operations and acts as the restaurant’s gregarious host. Together, they are the engine powering the city’s first Bangladeshi restaurant, housed in a former deli in Journal Square, just blocks from the thicket of Indian restaurants on Newark Avenue.
Though there is a small number of Bangladeshi restaurants in the New York City area, particularly clustered in the Queens neighborhoods of Jackson Heights and Astoria, Korai Kitchen offers an experience, both culinary and atmospheric, that is more akin to visiting a Bangladeshi home. The restaurant is small, offering a buffet of 12 dishes for lunch and dinner. The menu changes twice a day. There are bhorthas, or mashes, made of boiled eggplants, of tomatoes, of potatoes. Light curries of fish like hilsa or rui, of hard-boiled eggs, of chicken in coconut milk. For dessert, there is mishti doi, “sweet yogurt,” the soft, pastel color of peaches and silky on the tongue.
There is no à la carte menu. “We knew there’d be a lot of people who might be a little hesitant or uncertain about what to order, what to expect, what dishes smell like or taste like,” Farhana Rahman explained. “The buffet was an easy way to literally put it all out there.”
Korai Kitchen, which the women own together, grew out of a mother’s love for cooking and her daughter’s desire to showcase its glories. Neither had experience working in a restaurant: Gulshan Rahman, who moved to Jersey City from Dhaka in 1986, once designed jewelry for a living before managing her husband’s convenience store. Farhana Rahman, born and raised in Jersey City, worked in management consulting.
“I love feeding people,” said Gulshan Rahman, who began cooking as a 16-year-old newlywed in Bogra, Bangladesh. “Since my kids’ friends come over, they always said: ‘Auntie, why don’t you open a restaurant? Your food is so good!’ Always, I thought they are just telling me as courtesy. Then they grew up, and they’re still telling me to do the same.”
So she listened to their pleas: She began a catering service in 2015. A steady stream of loyal customers gave her the confidence to open a restaurant.
For her, maintaining the restaurant is exhausting, joyous work. (She is also the sole owner of New Hilsa Grocery Store, around the corner.) The pumpkin she was hacking into chunks that afternoon went inside one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes, pumpkin shrimp curry. It’s spiced with restraint, the squash softened but still firm, the shrimp cooked to just-tender.
“It’s not something you can walk into an Indian restaurant and get,” Farhana Rahman said. “Even though it’s mostly Bangladeshi people working there, right?”
There is a long, often-unexplored history of Bangladeshi immigrants’ owning nominally Indian restaurants in the United States. But the food isn’t Bangladeshi, nor does it reflect the varied regional cuisines of India, one of the largest and most populous countries in the world.
Farhana Rahman is steadfast in distinguishing her mother’s Bangladeshi food from the Indian food typically encountered in restaurants in America: “Chicken tikka masala, butter chicken, paneer,” she said with a sigh.
That is why she has made a point of building such distinctions into Korai Kitchen’s branding. The description on the restaurant’s Instagram account, which Farhana Rahman runs, reads “#NoChickenTikkaMasala.”
