‘True’ Bangladeshi Cooking Comes to Queens
In this beef eater’s town, there is always some new cow to go on about: the steaks, dry-aged and otherwise. Faddish new burgers. Barbecued ribs, both southern and Korean. Pastrami, hot dogs, French-dip sandwiches. The beef I want to talk about, though, is at Mezban House, a new Bangladeshi restaurant that’s been making a lot of noise in an otherwise-quiet corner of Elmhurst. Called jhura mangsho, or beef jhura, it’s a home-cooking standard in Bangladesh. And it’s been hard to find in any New York restaurant, until now.
A spunky curry made with ginger, garlic, “many spices,” and enough chile to light up your taste buds, it’s cooked for three or four hours until the meat becomes soft and tender enough to shred. Then, it’s dry-fried until crispy and caramelized in bits. You could eat fistfuls of it, scooping it up with torn-off pieces of the light, rice-flour-based chaler roti. Sharmin Akther, the restaurant’s chef and founder, treats it with as much craft as any other beef in New York.
Akther had moved from Bangladesh to New York in early 2022, both for her husband’s work and so that she could open a restaurant. She had dreamed of having a place since her college days, when she wanted a café and snack shop, but only started cooking after getting married. “I was just trying to continuously impress my father-in-law. He loves food, and he has lots of recipe books,” she says. But, in Bangladesh, she had too many responsibilities to her extended family, and her dream wasn’t supported. “I just decided, No, I need to go right away,” she tells me. “I came here to open a restaurant, to prove to myself that I can.”
She found a partner in Mehraz Ahmed. When he first came to New York from his hometown of Sylhet 15 years ago, he’d drink tea on Starling Avenue (a.k.a. Bangla Bazaar) in Parkchester and lament the quality of the food in his new home. “There were only a few Bangladeshi restaurants, and people’s goal wasn’t to eat authentic Bangladeshi food,” he says. “It was just to eat Bangladeshi food.” His feelings didn’t change as he tried more Bangladeshi food in New York and around the country, and he started wanting to open his own place. But he could never find the right cook to partner with. Then in late 2022, he came across promising looking posts from Akther, who was hawking her food on a Facebook group called “American Bangladeshi Community Help.” “I’ve been around the world to Bangladeshi restaurants, and when I tried her food, I realized she has something different,” he says. “I’ve talked to many people, and she’s more passionate than anyone else.”
Ahmed met Akther when she was cooking out of her apartment. He kept ordering her food and expressed his confidence in her food. Soon, the business became too much for her home kitchen. In February, Akther and her husband rented kitchen space in another restaurant, Fiesta Healthy Mexican Grill, as a trial. (They are no longer involved there.) But it quickly became obvious that the place was too small for the demand. So Akther approached Ahmed and asked if he’d want to open a restaurant with her. “I had no hesitations,” he remembers. This spring, they opened Mezban House, named for the beef-centric feasts held in Chittagong, Akther’s hometown, for hundreds of years.
Inside, the walls are painted pumpkin orange, there are some decorations that look like they came from Pinterest or TJ Maxx, and young families make up a surprising percentage of diners. While the restaurant is not in one of the city’s Bangladeshi hubs — Parkchester, Astoria, Jamaica — customers have been going out of their way to make the trip to Elmhurst. “It’s food that I would eat at home, but they’ve done it at such a high quality that I haven’t seen at any other Bangladeshi restaurant in New York City,” says Naq Zamal, a Jackson Heights native who has been four times in the last three weeks. “Honestly, I’ve yet to see it done at this level in any of the Little Bangladeshis that I’ve visited in America.”
Locally, Jersey City’s Korai Kitchen has stood out for pushing Bangladeshi food into the spotlight. (Park Slope’s Masalawala & Sons has done the same for the cuisine of neighboring West Bengal.) But in the Bangladeshi community, Zamal notes, people are more likely to go out for Indo-Chinese cuisine, Afghan foods, or dishes like biryani that are more broadly South Asian. (And many Bangladeshi restaurateurs opened ostensibly Indian restaurants.) As Ahmed and Akther see it, the cooking at other restaurants is “generic” and “commercialized.” “This is actual Bangladeshi food — you can call it true Bangladeshi food,” Akther says.
There are unusually lively vorta (or bhurta), offered individually or a medley of eight screaming of mustard oil’s irrepressible flavor, including chepa shutki, lip-smackingly salty and coursing with red chile; mellower dal; and kalo jeera (black cumin or nigella), as intense tasting as it is jet-black. Most customers who come in, the owners say, order one of the mezbani dishes, and so should you. Maybe the mezbani beef, a famous curry that’ll lash your tongue, or the kalabhuna, long-fried beef in inky black sauce made with cumin and powdered radhuni (wild celery seed). Just don’t overlook the nora dal gosht, fat split peas happily luxuriating in a broth enriched with bone marrow. There’s plenty of good seafood, too, like the loitta shutki bhuna with salted Bombay duck, chewy as salt cod, and whole cloves of garlic cooked until meltingly soft. Or go for the sorisha (available with both flaky pomfret and oily hilsa fish), a grainy, almost creamy sauce of mustard seed, mustard oil, chile, and nigella.
Akther’s insistence on making everything herself is seen through to the end of the menu. She prepares her own gulab jamun, which arrives on a bed of clotted cream and red rice for the malai jarda. For the layered dessert known as laccha semai that’s traditionally eaten during Eid, she makes her own vermicelli from scratch, frying then drowning it in warm milk with nuts and spices.
The other week, Ahmed was visiting friends and family in London, home to the biggest Sylheti community outside Bangladesh. “We are not even close to how they’re operating,” he says. “They are serving food that tells the story of us — I want to bring our restaurant industry in New York closer to theirs.”