I pointed at a brown thing, one in a long line of brown things sitting on the steam table, and asked for it with some rice. Moumon reached for the spoon, then paused thoughtfully. “Wait, please,” he said to me from behind the counter. He asked a question in Urdu to an old man at the opposite end of the room. There was a discussion, then Moumon let go of the spoon and turned to me, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I’ll give you naan with the haleem. It is to be eaten with bread.”
That’s how Moumon and I met. He was a man serious about his food, serious about getting it right. At Shaheen Sweets, his nondescript Pakistani restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens, there was no menu; there was that steam table. There was no such thing as ordering a curry and your choice of meat to go in it, as I had come to expect at other “Indian” restaurants. He scoffed at those places. “That is not how this food is to be made,” he told me at one point. “Every dish has a different mixture of spices and meat. You cook them together for hours; that is how you get the right taste. You don’t heat up a gravy and put meat into it.”
So I ate his food with interest: the haleem was an unbelievably tasty mix of beef and lentils cooked so long it became a tacky paste. It, like everything else I would come to eat there, was like nothing I’d ever eaten before, an exploratory education in South Asian cooking. He appreciated my curiosity and offered guidance, and made it a point to sit down with me for a spell, regardless of how his line of customers built up. He talked to me about his sweets, ones so good he was exporting them back to Pakistan. He had me try his complexly flavored gulab jamun, which was something like the greatest doughnut on earth, and his beautifully textured rasmalai, a more perfect form of cool, sweet milk.
In between conversations about food, he also enjoyed holding court on a variety of philosophical and religious issues. I confess that, in the midst of all this new information, I didn’t always know what he was talking about, especially the time I was shoveling goat-foot curry in my mouth as he explained how Jesus Christ got off the cross, went for a long walk, and retired in Kashmir. A minute later he was telling me about cooking a syrup so hot it can burn a hole through the palm of your hand, stigmata-style. It’s entirely possible that Moumon was a little bananas.
But we were becoming friends over curries and sugar and warm welcome. He invited me to come in mornings to learn how to cook his food; I brought out-of-town visitors to discover his flavors and stories. I regretted never finding the time to take him up on his offer—but one night, while there with a tableful of those visitors, I found my chance.
Next week: My chance.
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