Masalawala & Sons

Clay pots, mustard oil, memory

Clay pots do quiet work for Chintan Pandya, chef and partner at Masalawala & Sons in New York City, where Bengali cooking carries the line. At the Park Slope restaurant, his station is tied less to reinvention than to recovery: fish roe poached in clay, prawns roasted in young coconut, lamb worked down into a sticky masala. Pandya trained at the Oberoi Centre for Learning and Development, then cooked through Yantra in Singapore, Junoon in New York City from 2016-2017, and Rahi from 2017 before his work with Unapologetic Foods became the public shape of his discipline. At Masalawala & Sons, that discipline sits beside the memories of Satyen Mazumdar, the Kolkata-born father of restaurateur Roni Mazumdar, whose recollections of Bengali homes, guesthouses, street food and family cooking give the place its root system. The restaurant opened in Park Slope in September 2022, after the original Lower East Side Masalawala had closed in 2021. This version is larger in ambition and more exact in its subject. Pandya keeps the cooking regional, appetite-led and direct, with the ornament stripped away before it can blur the dish.

A Bengali program built from the pot up

The method here starts with vessel and fat. Mustard oil gives lift and heat; clay holds smoke, moisture and the memory of fire. Macher Dim, one of the house dishes, poaches hilsa fish roe in a clay pot with coriander and smoked chili, a family recipe traced to the 1950s. Daab Chingri brings tiny prawns, shells and heads intact, into a young coconut; the kitchen roasts the whole thing, then scrapes the coconut flesh into the curry so the texture changes at the table. Kosha Mangsho takes lamb into a darker register, braised until the masala clings, then paired with luchi. Keema Kaleji folds minced goat and liver with egg, black cardamom and clove, asking the sauce to soften what could otherwise turn blunt. Bhetki appears two ways: steamed in banana leaf with mustard paste as Bhetki Paturi, or fried as Biyebarir Fish Fry, the kind of wedding-house gesture that makes sense only when the coating stays crisp and the fish stays clean.

The room keeps pace with the food

The room is warm, loud with service, and painted with color rather than restraint. Murals, close tables and the movement of shared plates give it the feel of a family function without turning the reference into costume. On Fifth Avenue, Satyen Mazumdar’s portrait on the awning makes the lineage plain before the first plate lands. Inside, the pass has to carry small plates, mid-size dishes and larger courses without flattening their character into one pace. Clay pans arrive still tied to their heat. Coconut, smoke, ghee and mustard oil move through the room in turns. The counter of memory is not abstract here; it is Macher Dim, Daab Chingri, Kosha Mangsho and the hands that know when to stop cooking them.