Learning to make a Bangladeshi chicken korma from one of East Sixth Street’s original proprietors.
Francis Lam in the New York Times:
"I asked Mubdi about the oddity of “Indian Row” being mostly free of Indian people, and he laughed again. “We had to call the restaurants Indian, because nobody knew what Bangladesh was! We named ours Gandhi, because people knew Gandhi from the movies. Our next place was called Passage to India. That was another movie!”
The milky northern Indian food these restaurants served wasn’t food the cooks grew up with in Bangladesh. “We didn’t even know what a tandoor was,” Mubdi said. Chicken tikka masala was just something customers kept asking for, so someone had to figure out how to make it. “Everyone loved chicken tikka masala!” Mubdi exclaimed. And for a while, it really did seem like everyone: hippies, protofoodies, uptowners, downtowners and out-of-towners all flocked to Indian Row."