The Mustang Thakali Kitchen in Jackson Heights offers authentic Nepali cuisine. Photo: Roxanne Wang.
Mustang Thakali Kitchen, in Jackson Heights, is, according to its owner, the one authentic Nepali restaurant in New York City, distinguished as much for its history as for its cuisine: The owners, Nabin Sherchan, 50, and his wife, Sharmila, 48, wagered their past to pay for their future. Four years after Nabin came to the U.S. in 1998 alone, Sharmila won the visa lottery and followed with their five-year-old son, and in 2007 they sold the land they owned back home to pay for their dream, a restaurant that served the food they grew up eating.
The Sherchans were fruit farmers before they came to New York. They used the money from the land sale, about $30,000, to lease the space that belonged to an Indian restaurant and then transform it to a Nepalese restaurant.
They chose Jackson Heights because of a discovery Nabin had made on a previous visit – the neighborhood had not a single Nepalese restaurant, or at least not an authentic one, by his standards. The bustling streets of Jackson Heights in Queens offer different ethnic cuisines from block to block, even door to door. One of the fastest-growing immigrant communities is the Nepalese, whose numbers have tripled in the past ten years. There are approximately 6,000 Nepali immigrants now in Queens, living mainly in Elmhurst, Woodside, and Jackson Heights.
“I was fearless at that time,” said Nabin, when he saw the growing Nepalese community. The population is so diverse — Colombian, Ecuadorean, Argentinian, Indians, Pakistanis, Tibetans, Nepalese, and Bangladeshis — that restaurants often try to incorporate food from other cultures. There are sushi bars in places that aren’t Japanese, or Nepalese restaurants that serve Indian food.
Thali. Photo: Roxanne Wang.
Thakali Kitchen stays true to culinary tradition. Thakali is a Nepalese tribe, located in the Mustang, an area that extends northward onto the Tibetan plateau. The Thakali are so famous for their food that even restaurants in the capital of Katmandu call themselves “Thakali Kitchen.” Curries are served without heavy cream or butter, spiced with less ginger, and customers can replace rice with two types of buckwheat dough, yhosi or ghoken, which are served as bits of cooked dough or as a pancake. Dishes are made based on traditional Thakali recipe and use spices found in the mountain Himalaya such as timur (Szechuan pepper) and moshel. This is what distinguishes it from Indian dishes.
“Everyone knows this place,” said Pramod Dangol, a regular customer who travels from New Jersey to Queens about twice a month, when he feels homesick. “I miss Nepal. When I miss Nepal I come here.”
While Pramod is having the restaurant’s most popular dish, Chicken Momo, the manager’s recommendation for a first-time order is “thali,” a set of items organized around a mound of rice, including achar (mixed pickle), rayo ko saag (mustard green), and aloo gobi (potato mixed with cauliflower and a kind of curry) with sukuti (dried beef) or goat. Thakali Kitchen puts pumpkin into one of their curry sauces so it tastes sweeter than more familiar Indian curries. The yhosi and ghoken are unique, says the manager: “They are Nepalese dough that you’re not going to taste anywhere else.”
It’s been eight years since the restaurant opened in 2008. “To renovate this place, we borrowed $30,000 from a friend, and have a loan of $50,000 dollars from the bank. It took us four years for the restaurant to pay off the money from my friend… I’m still in debt now,” said Nabin when asked about the difficulties of running a restaurant. Nabin, who pays $9,300 in monthly rent, expects to break even in 2018.
Thali with rice replaced by yoshi. Photo: Roxanne Wang.
Sharmila is in charge of everything in the kitchen. “At the beginning, I didn’t know how to cook every dish, but I asked my mother and learned them,” she said. The Sherchans take turns going back and forth to Nepal every six to eight months, to get the spices that make their food authentic.
The restaurant business is now stable, as more and more people who are looking for a new exotic cuisine come here, including neighborhood residents, young foodies, and families. Still, over half of the customers are Nepalese. “We are very well-known among the Nepali communities right now,” said Nabin. “Even governors who had meetings at the United Nations came here!”
Nabin is a member of the Non-resident Nepali Association (NARA), a global organization that helps new immigrants and residents find jobs, open bank accounts, and buy insurance, as well as assisting businesses to find investors back home. He and his wife are also supporters of Nepali Congress (NC), the biggest democratic Nepalese political party. Last year, they helped raise funds to help in aid efforts after the catastrophic earthquake in Nepal. By devoting his time and energy into these groups, he feels that he is living in both places at once, and maintains his connection to Nepal.
Chef Kunchok Tsering is from Mustang in Nepal. He has been working here for five years. Photo: Roxanne Wang.
When asked about their future plans, the couple say that Ashraya, their son, enjoys helping out in the restaurant, and likes to cook a lot. “He could take over the restaurant, but I wish he can go to college and do something else,” said Nabin. Their daughter, Aneca, who was born in 2003, comes to the restaurant after school to finish her homework and have dinner. “My grandma (in Nepal) told me that she hopes I can become a doctor in the future, but I don’t know about that,” said Aneca.
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