“[Mamdani] is the underdog who’s come out of nowhere and become unstoppable, shining a light on the underdog restaurants that don’t have deep pockets and are surviving when it’s harder than ever to do business in New York,” says Melissa McCart, editor of Eater NY. “[He’s] going to the outer boroughs while Adams is at [private membership club] Zero Bond. He is a runaway success, and his restaurant endorsements have become outsized.”
Just a few months ago, Mamdani was a relatively unknown figure, and critics – including Adams, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and most recently President Trump – have framed the 34-year-old democratic socialist as untested and too radical to lead the US’s biggest city, a job that comes with a $116bn (£88bn) budget and global scrutiny.
Still, much of Mamdani’s appeal is that he presents himself as a candidate of the people – and that extends to most of his culinary choices. Instead of being photographed at New York’s “must-dine” hotspots like The Eighty Six in the West Village, Carbone in Soho or Chateau Royale in Greenwich Village, he often hangs out at places like Kabab King, a 24-hour restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens, that he’s been visiting since high school.
“He rides hard for the restaurants that he loves and he mentions them a lot, like Kabab King, Sami’s Kabab House and Little Flower Cafe [in Astoria]” said Priya Kirshna, a food reporter at The New York Times who recently profiled Mamdani for the paper. “He’s a guy who loves to be a regular at his favourite spots and who really supports those businesses. What stood out to me is that he loves food in a quite authentic way. When his plate of biryani arrived [at Kabab King], he dug in with the eagerness of someone who has been eating the dish all his life.”
Like a parent enticing a picky toddler to experiment beyond the world of beige foods, Mamdani leads with his stomach, straight to under-represented parts of the city’s dynamic food scene.
