THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020 9
PHOTOGRAPH BY KYOKO HAMADA FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
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TABLESFORTWO
Jalsa Grill & Gravy
964 Coney Island Ave., Brooklyn
“I’m a chaat person,” explained Nowshin
Ali the other day, over FaceTime.
We were discussing the menu at Jalsa
Grill & Gravy, the restaurant she co-
owns with her business partner, Anurag
Shrivastava, in Brooklyn’s Little Pakistan,
south of Prospect Park. Ali and Shrivas-
tava met while co-managing a nearby
Afghani restaurant; in 2018, they opened
their own place, featuring the food of
their native India. For Ali, who immi-
grated to the U.S. with her young son in
2013, this means the signature dishes of
Lucknow, her home town, including
chaats and biryani.
Chaats are defined on Jalsa’s menu as
well as I’ve ever seen: “crispy-crunchy-
spicy-tangy Indian snacks.” In India,
they’re often sold on the street; in the
U.S., they’re treated like appetizers. Was
I a chaat person before I tried Jalsa’s
iterations? I’d always enjoyed them, but
I don’t remember ever crowing in plea-
sure the way I did after taking a bite of
Shrivastava’s palak chaat: a pile of spin-
ach—lightly battered in chickpea flour,
warm yet nearly raw, bright green and
refreshing—tossed with glossy tamarind
sauce, house-made chaat masala, crispy
shards of lentil noodle, onion, tomato,
and cilantro.
I had planned to visit Jalsa before the
pandemic, at the passionate urging of
two friends who live near the restaurant.
Instead, Jalsa came to me; it remains
open for takeout and delivery. And how
could it not? Ali and Shrivastava are not
much for sitting still. Before the cri-
sis, they were also running a nonprofit,
supplemented by their income from the
restaurant, called People in Need, which
provides an after-school program for
neighborhood children and workshops
for empowering immigrant women.
The after-school program is currently
closed, but People in Need is helping
to facilitate remote learning, as well as
getting groceries to locals who are inca-
pacitated or just hard on their luck—a
cabdriver suddenly without passengers,
a doctor’s office receptionist without pa-
tients. In recent weeks, many food-ori-
ented businesses have pivoted toward
community service, finding ways to feed
hospital staffs and people who have lost
their jobs. In Little Pakistan, the prece-
dent stretches back years. The Council
of Peoples Organization (COPO), which
has offered legal services to South Asian
and Muslim immigrants since 2002,
was born out of the neighborhood’s first
Pakistani grocery store.
Normally, Ali and Shrivastava share
cooking duties with Varun Patri, a chef
with twenty-three years of experience.
Because Patri lives in New Jersey, he’s
been unable to come to work and pre-
pare the dishes for which he’s usually
responsible. “So he’s telling us every-
thing over the phone, what to do,” Ali
told me. They were fast learners: the
cubes of fresh paneer I ordered the other
night were curdy and light, slicked in
a luscious makhani sauce, made with
tomato, heavy cream, and onion cara-
melized in butter.
I ate my paneer makhani with a
thrillingly bitter lime pickle; with yel-
low shahi rice, steamed in chicken stock
and turmeric; with gobi ka keema, a mix
of minced cauliflower and bell peppers
cooked down until it’s sweet and paste-
like, punctuated by the gentle crunch of
freshly ground whole spices. I drizzled
tamarind sauce over bronzed, sharp-
edged samosas filled simply with soft
potato flecked with fennel seeds. One
morning, I enjoyed the last bites of Ali’s
spicy dum biryani straight from the re-
frigerator for breakfast.
When I asked her about the future
of Jalsa, Ali told me that she couldn’t
imagine the restaurant closing. “We will
put our life into it,” she said. She told
me about a mother in the neighborhood
who was sick with COVID-19 and quar-
antined from her children in their small
apartment. The mother had been rising
at 5 A.M. each day to cook for her family,
sanitizing the kitchen before the kids
woke up. “They talk through the door,”
Ali said. “It’s heartbreaking. So I’ve been
sending them cooked food from Jalsa.”
(Dishes $7-$15.)
—Hannah Goldfield
