Helen Rosner's Review of #1 NYC Restaurant Kabawa

Photo by Yael Malka, from Helen Rosner's "The Caribbean Resturant Reinventing the Momofuku Empire"

I see that the Caribbean restaurant Kabawa tops The New York Times’ 2026 “The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City” list. New Yorker food writer Helen Rosner reviewed Kabawa last year, calling it “easygoing and joyous.” She wrote, 

Though there’s no shortage of high points at Kabawa—among them a rainbow-sprinkle-studded baton of flan so dense it verges on cheesecake—the restaurant’s success lies less in the strength of any individual dish than in the ebullient sum of its parts. 

She says, “an almost euphoric pleasure comes from simply being there, pumped full of life by the colors and the smells.” 

In a year-end piece called “The Best Things I Ate in 2025,” Rosner picked Kabawa’ curry goat as one of her favorite dishes. She says,

Tender shredded goat meat, luscious and gently gamy, is formed into a tidy rectangle, then seared to a crackly crispness. The fiery sauce Creole spooned over top is dark, thick, complex, and alive with spices and a bit of fishy funk from dried scallops. The dish is crowned with a pile of glossy fried curry leaves, whose woodsy, otherworldly aroma eddies around your face as the dish is placed before you, a promise of imminent pleasure.

I love critics who are guided by pleasure. It’s Rosner’s chief criterion. Kabawa passed the test spectacularly.