Jibro fry, slices of tender and subtly seasoned goat tongue, was the dish that took our first meal at Newa Chhe to the top. Will we have the opportunity to taste it again?
We began fortifying ourselves with the hearty food at this Nepalese restaurant (pronounced Knee-wah Chay) not long after it opened, in December 2023, in Sunnyside. The restaurant is a partnership between Radip (rah-Deep) Shrestha and three of his longtime friends: Bijay Khayargoli, Kunchok Sherpa and Pashupati Shrestha (no relation to Radip).
All four men hail from the Kathmandu Valley, the mountain-ringed home of the Newar people in central Nepal. The fertile valley has given rise to a rich menu at Newa Chhe, and we’ve eaten our way through much of it. But although Radip and his partners have wanted the eatery to be “purely authentic,” a few dishes from the restaurant’s early months have not survived on the day-to-day menu. It might be, as Radip suggests, that some dishes are too authentic.
Radip, 39, has been working in the restaurant business almost since his arrival in New York, in 2005. That year he co-founded the Indian snack shop Bombay Frankie Roti Roll, which, to this day, is a favorite of students at nearby Columbia University. Today Radip lives with his wife and child in this same Manhattan neighborhood, Morningside Heights – where the highest point, at 256 feet, is more than a mile lower than the basin of the Kathmandu Valley.
Radip worked at several other spots nearby, too. But deep down he realized that managing an Indian cafe, a Thai restaurant, and a gay bar-lounge, all for other people, would not be nearly as satisfying as running a Nepalese restaurant for himself. So when a spacious corner in Sunnyside came on the market, Radip and his partners seized the opportunity.
Compared with “Himalayan Heights” – part of the Jackson Heights neighborhood, about a mile and a half to the east, that is densely populated with Nepalese and Tibetan restaurants, street vendors, and other businesses – Sunnyside is more diverse. Two dozen national cuisines are close at hand, some of them rarely found elsewhere in the city, among them Algerian, Armenian, Bolivian, and Paraguayan. Before the arrival of Newa Chhe, South Asian cuisines weren’t utterly absent from Sunnyside, but they didn’t saturate the neighborhood either; the new restaurant had plenty of room to stand out.
From the start, Radip and his partners were determined to offer only Nepalese items on the menu – “not Chinese, not Indian,” as are often served at other South Asian restaurants. When we mentioned the chow mein that we’d ordered during one group meal, Radip noted that it didn’t contain soy sauce, as we might expect at a Chinese restaurant, let alone added MSG; it had been prepared Nepalese-style, with “oyster sauce and ground spices such as garlic and turmeric.”
Traditionally, he also observed, fewer spices have been available in the Kathmandu Valley than in much of India; before the advent of motor vehicles, the mountains that surround the valley must have made overland trade very laborious. Consequently, Radip added, many Nepalese dishes “use much less spice” than their Indian counterparts, and the seasonings are more often combined “from scratch” rather than supplied by pre-made spice mixes. The result: “more taste from meat.”
Radip’s emphasis on meat turns our eyes toward the menu, where we’ll never expect to find fresh greens or anything like a simple salad. We have, however, enjoyed other menu items at Newa Chhe that are meat-free, such as quati, billed as a nine-bean soup (we didn’t stop to count), and the fat lentil pancake called a bara. Ours was bulls-eyed with an egg. And it was here, on a thali – a platter that contains small tastes of many different dishes – that we had our first delicious encounter with deep-fried bitter gourd.
To be honest, however, the meat dishes tempted us most. We’ve enjoyed a choila of grilled and marinated duck; buffalo choila, as part of another multi-taste platter called samay baji; a kachela egg fry, sautéed with minced chicken, full-flavored even in small spoonfuls; chicken chilli momo, one of Newa Chhe’s many takes on the Himalayan dumpling; sukuti, jerky-like strips of buffalo meat; and bhutun, goat belly – that is, sautéed stomach and intestine.
Regarding offal dishes such as bhutun,”You want to be authentic,” Radip told us, but sometimes “the market won’t allow it.” Often the goat intestine is discarded at the time of slaughter, he continued, so that even his suppliers can’t get it; the stomach alone is “too chewy.”
And while Newa Chhe continues to offer tauko fry, which features various enticingly crispy bits of marinated goat head, Radip observed that the heads take up a lot of space in the restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator. Since there’s only “one tongue per head,” he added, the jibro fry that we enjoyed at an early meal is no longer published on the menu. Even so, there is still one tongue per head, and someone has to get them; it never hurts to ask.
Offal aside, Newa Chhe’s menu continues to grow, and perhaps someday soon it will include desserts. In the meantime, a mango lassi – which has some ineffable difference from all the mango lassis that have quenched our inflamed taste buds at many Indian restaurants – might do.
Newa Chhe also has a full bar, serving not only three varieties of Nepalese beer but also Khukri Rum, named for the signature weapon of Nepal’s native Gurkha soldiers. Radip hopes to import a special edition of the rum, presented in a khukri-shaped bottle. We’d fight for a taste!
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