Babu, a new restaurant in Greenwich Village which serves food from Calcutta, apparently made up its menu according to Black Sheep’s hip-hop classic, ‘The Choice Is Yours.’ The formerly price-list-free restaurant sits below Kati Roll Co. and is by the same owner (thanks, Turbanhead):
… the menu came without prices. Instead, guests were invited to eat, enjoy, and then, at the end of the meal, pay what they thought it was worth. “I’d rather work out the kinks in the kitchen first,” Payal Saha, the restaurant’s owner, explained the other day, sitting at a corner table of Babu, which was about a quarter full of couples quietly eating and mentally calculating the value of their experience…
Payments range from generous (foodies) to parsimonious (Midwesterners):
“We had one couple who paid two hundred bucks for an eighty-dollar meal,” Saha said… “We talked to some people before sending them their check, asking if they would pay fifty dollars for this meal,” Jung said. “The people mostly said yes, except for one couple from Minneapolis. They were shocked at that price.”
In classic desi fashion, our fine young cannibals took advantage of the price-free policy:
A rowdy group of ten young Indians walked in one Friday evening and occupied the restaurant’s large central table. Their response to no prices was to leave no money; they didn’t even tip the wait staff.
But all good things must come to an end on the credit card slip, top copy:
A few weeks ago, prices were finally written into the menu: a three-course meal with wine comes to about fifty dollars a head.
The New Yorker also covered M.I.A. recently — is Eustace Tilly crushing on cumin?
