Photos: Cole Sinanian
Chef and rapper Bikash Kharel is upgrading his restaurant, While In Kathmandu, for uncertain times.
BY COLE SINANIAN
cole@queensledger.com
Opening a restaurant devoted exclusively to Nepalese food, a cuisine not well-known to the American palate, is always a risk in New York City, says Bikash Kharel.
But Kharel — a rapper, music-producer, chef, and the owner of While In Kathmandu on Seneca Avenue — has never been one to shy away from risk. Born in Nepal and raised in Ridgewood, Kharel inherited a life in the restaurant business from his father, who ran the aptly named Nepalese Indian Restaurant just a few blocks away from 2012 until 2022. It was, however, heavier on the Indian than the Nepalese, catering primarily to the older, take-out-focused local crowd who came for the sorts of dishes they’d come to expect from the rice-and-curry-forward South Asian cuisine most commonly found stateside. It was familiar Indian fare, easy on American tastebuds, though quite distinct from the dishes Kharel grew up eating as a child in the Chitwan region of southern Nepal, from which the family emigrated in 2006, when Kharel was 13.
Jhol Momos, for example — Nepalese steamed dumplings served swimming in a rich, bright-orange sauce — did not sell like the curries did. Nor did the Thakali Thali, an impressive traditional platter of pickled vegetables, lentil soup, crispy soybeans, grilled egg and delicately spiced chunks of aromatic chicken called Choila. Rice looks different in Nepal, a Himalayan country marked by deep valleys and jagged mountain peaks, making traditional rice cultivation difficult. Here, they eat an oat-like form of beaten rice known as Baji, or a savory puffed rice, called Gophuki.
“Nepali food is a unique identity itself,” Kharel said. “Not selling curries, not selling rice, that was a very bold decision.”
But the Ridgewood of Kharel’s youth is not the Ridgewood of 2012, which is not the Ridgewood of today. Like many New York City neighborhoods, Ridgewood has grown into a trendier, younger version of its former self, with waves of artsy transplants starting to spill over from Bushwick in the 2010s, bringing with them a new dining scene to match. Now, nearby destination restaurants like Hellbender or Rolo’s grace the pages of the New Yorker, and Kharel has tailored his business model accordingly.
With the neighborhood’s new arrivals and their more adventurous, ethnically curious palates, Kharel saw opportunity.
“A lot of people talk shit about the newer demographics,” Kharel said, “but I feel like they’re more open to things. They have a bit of Christopher Columbus syndrome,” he said. “They want to discover shit.”
Photos: Cole Sinanian
With the blessing of his father, Kharel set about opening a restaurant that would cater to this new demographic. Although he is Hindu, Kharel was at this point making beats and rapping in Nepali under the moniker “Funky Buddha” In Nepal, the Buddha is a cultural figure more than a religious one, admired by Hindus and Buddhists alike, Kharel said.
He took the summer of 2016 to travel around Nepal in a van, exploring the country he’d only ever known as a child. Three weeks of this trip were spent in Kathmandu, the capital, where he worked with local artists to record samples of traditional music— a project that resulted in his mixtape, called “While in Kathmandu.”
In 2017, upon his return from Nepal, Kahrel opened the restaurant, which he named after the mixtape. Initially, the concept was “the first Nepalese coffee shop and bar in New York,” a laid-back Nepalese cafe and breakfast spot by day and bar by night, offering small, tapas-style Nepalese bites throughout.
The menu, based mainly on the cuisine of the Newar people of Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, wasn’t supposed to be the main event, but after a glowing New York Times review from September 2017 hailed his Nepalese-New Yorker fusion an instant neighborhood classic, the floodgates were opened. Suddenly, he was getting travelers from Brooklyn, Manhattan and beyond showing up to the bar at night, long after the kitchen had closed, asking for dinner.
“I would see a horde of people coming in, their faces dropping because they trekked all the way out here and realized that the restaurant is not open,” Kharel said.
Seeing the opportunity, Kharel pivoted, adjusting the restaurant’s concept to full-dinner service with food as the primary focus. But despite his recent local acclaim — with outlets like Eater and The Infatuation offering up rave reviews — Kharel says business has been better. Though he’s fortunate to have a good relationship with his landlord, whose rent hikes Kharel described as reasonable, relatively speaking, sales continue to decline. People aren’t eating out like they used to, Kharel says. Weekends and dinners are packed, but lunchtime is routinely dead. While in Kathmandu’s dreamy covered back patio remains closed simply because the space hasn’t been needed. It’s of course not the customers’ fault, Kharel acknowledged. He recognizes the effects of New York City’s affordability crisis on New Yorkers’ spending habits.
But sales are sales, and a restaurant must net a minimum profit to stay operational, driving Kharel in search of creative solutions. He’s working on what he calls a “scaleable Nepalese food culture brand” that would offer something like the Nepalese fast-casual version of Kava or Sweetgreen. In the meantime, Kharel plans to tweak While In Kathmandu’s concept yet again, hoping to bring it closer to his original vision of a cafe by day and bar by night, with a seasonal menu that pushes the boundaries of novelty while maintaining its Nepalese roots. Though Kharel was adamant that the restaurant’s essential vibe would not change, he did say he would soon be adding a stage for nightly concerts in the dining room’s far corner.
He says the community has been largely supportive of the coming changes, which he announced on Reddit late last year.
“There’s a lot of love behind it, and I felt that too,” Kharel said. “It made me feel more like this is my home. Like it’s important for me to be doing what I’m doing.”
