There’s an old saying: you are what you eat. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the 18th-century French gastronome who wrote The Physiology of Taste, might have disagreed. He believed that animals eat, but men dine — that civilisation begins not with the hunt, but the table.
When Mikhail Gorbachev served Chicken Kiev to world leaders at the Soviet Embassy in Washington in 1990, The Economist called it “the perfect symbol of Russia’s new internationalism and consumerism.” It was performative politics in pastry — a buttery monument to a thawing Cold War.
Which makes
Zohran Mamdani’s first public meal with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Jackson Heights — a modest table at Laliguras Bistro — all the more fascinating. No crystal stemware, no foie gras, no carefully choreographed appetisers. Just four dishes: tingmo bread, aloo dum, chilli chicken, and momos. Each one born somewhere in the Himalayan arc, each one wandering beyond its origin, and together forming something rare — a map of the subcontinent told through the quiet confidence of the immigrant kitchen.
Chilli Chicken: The Taste of Adaptation
Chilli chicken began not in China, but in Calcutta — a city that has always turned exile into art. Chinese restaurateurs in Tangra, adapting to Indian palates, swapped subtlety for sizzle. Soy sauce met green chillies, and the first Indo-Chinese classic was born.
It was fusion before the word existed — a culinary act of survival that became a national addiction. Every Indian Chinese (or Sino-Ludhianvi) joint today, from Shillong to Surat, owes something to that original compromise. In many ways, chilli chicken is what politics wishes it could be: hybrid, responsive, and unpretentious. Mamdani’s own brand of socialism — radical in thought, local in tone — isn’t so different. He is, in essence, the political version of Tangra’s invention: born elsewhere, adapted here, and now inseparable from the fabric of the city.
Aloo Dum: The Art of Simmering
Next came aloo dum — potatoes slow-cooked till they surrender. Its earliest incarnation, dum aloo, was Kashmiri: rich, restrained, built around yoghurt and cardamom. But as it travelled south and east, it shed its austerity and found new warmth.
In Bengal, alur dom became a sweeter, tomato-onion version eaten with luchi on Sunday mornings — the taste of leisure and lightness. What was once temple food became street food, proof that class can dissolve in the kitchen even when it refuses to in the legislature.
There’s something profoundly democratic about that. In aloo dum, the humblest of vegetables finds dignity not through elevation but through patience. The politics of slow cooking — letting flavours blend instead of boiling them into slogans — is something modern America could use more of.
Tingmo: Bread for the Many
Then came the tingmo, Tibet’s answer to the dinner roll. The name combines ting (cloud) and momo (dumpling) — a bread shaped like a spiral of steam. Soft, elastic, quietly unassuming. It exists not to dominate but to accompany.
In the hierarchy of dishes, tingmo is never the star. But without it, nothing else comes together. It absorbs flavour, balances heat, and binds the meal. In that sense, it is both the metaphor and the manifesto of the new left: solidarity as substance.
You don’t eat tingmo alone — and you don’t change the world by yourself.
Momos: Dumplings of the Diaspora
And then, the dish that needs no introduction: the momo. Tibet claims it. So does Nepal. Delhi, of course, mass-produced it and sold it with Schezwan sauce. The dumpling has travelled from monasteries to metro stations, from yak meat to paneer, from ritual offering to Instagram story.
To call it street food is to miss the point. The momo is a relic of migration — the edible memory of people who kept moving but refused to forget how to fold dough. In that way, it mirrors the South Asian experience itself: dislocated, adaptable, yet stubbornly intact.
For Mamdani and AOC to share momos in Queens — the most polyglot county in America — is no accident. It’s a tableau of belonging: the borough where languages overlap like layers of dough, and where identity is something you shape with your hands, not declare from a podium.
The Meaning of the Meal
Put together, this wasn’t a photo-op lunch; it was a soft manifesto served in four courses. Where Gorbachev once plated Chicken Kiev to signal that Russia could finally consume, Zohran Mamdani offered momo and aloo dum to remind America that politics could still commune.
Each dish spoke a different language of resistance — fusion against purity, patience against haste, solidarity against spectacle, migration against borders.
In the theatre of modern politics, the right has perfected the art of excess: gold-leaf steaks, marble lobbies, and the gospel of “I alone can fix it.” The left, when it remembers its heart, finds meaning in smaller things — a shared table, a borrowed recipe, a taste that carries across oceans.
And so, at Laliguras Bistro, between spoonfuls of potato curry and folds of steamed dough, Zohran Mamdani wasn’t just eating lunch with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — he was eating history. The history of indenture and empire, of ships and spices, of dishes dismissed as “ethnic” until they became unavoidable. A child of empire, tasting the food empire once exoticised, he turned the immigrant meal into a declaration of authorship.
In that quiet act of dining, Mamdani leaned into his Indian identity not as performance or costume, but as continuity — proof that assimilation need not mean amnesia, and that one can be rooted in Delhi yet elected in Queens without contradiction. Because sometimes, politics doesn’t need a podium. It only needs a plate — and the courage to serve from it.
Start a Conversation
Post comment