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’s 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. 

Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Cove"

Photo by Yael Malka, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Cove"

A special shout-out to Helen Rosner for her delectable “Tables for Two: Cove,” in the January 26, 2026, issue. Her descriptions of Cove’s food are ravishing! This, for example:

The dishes are simply beautiful. I nearly didn’t order a salad of golden beets with smoked yogurt, struggling to muster enthusiasm for yet another beet-and-dairy salad, but my dining companion insisted. It turned out to be amazing, a parade of roots in every shade of yellow, with bursts of brightness from what seemed like a whole bouquet of nasturtiums, orange and vermillion and gloaming purple.

And this:

An oyster is poached in chamomile oil and served with wisps of creamy chestnut. A carrot is roasted to marshmallow sweetness, tempura-fried, and wrapped in charred sweet leaves of caraflex cabbage, then draped in uni and drizzled with spiced quince syrup. Like much of what’s on McGarry’s menu, it has a lot going on, but it doesn’t feel busy or chaotic; McGarry layers ingredients and flavors like washes of watercolor.

The photos that illustrate Rosner’s piece are by Yael Malka. They’re as sensuous as Rosner’s prose. Someday I’ll compile a “Top Ten ‘Tables for Two’ Photos” list. At least one of Malka’s “Cove” pictures will likely be on it.