#18 – GULAB JAMUN at AL NAIMAT RESTAURANT & SWEETS

Once again Time Out New York released their Top 100 Dishes of the year and once again, I’m going to eat my way through every one. And no price point or subway delay will stop me. In no particular order, here’s my take on their Top 100.

New York is amazing for many reasons, but in the food world there’s nowhere else you can get just about every cuisine at almost any time of day. I love that some days I have Mexican for breakfast, Chinese dumplings for lunch, French food for dinner, and Indian for dessert. There are two things strange with that sentence. The first is I’m not usually up early enough for breakfast (especially to travel to a Mexican restaurant).

The other is that Indian is not the first cuisine you think of for dessert. Most people think Indian food and they think spicy curries and grilled meat on the tandoor. But there are quite a few Indian restaurants (or bakeries) that specialize in authentic Indian desserts. Al Naimat in Jackson Heights is one such spot.

After a nice dinner at the famous Jackson Diner (which truly feels like an Indian diner with old bored waiters and everything), we headed down the street to sample the sweets at Al Naimat. The desserts all looked so unique and delicious that we literally had to do some sampling. And the guy behind the counter offered us a taste of anything we wanted. I told him to slow down because if he kept giving us free samples, we’d have never bought anything.

I’m not sure of the name of all the sweets we tasted, but they were all unusual and mostly delicious. I loved the jalebi, which was an orange pretzel-shaped dough, fried, and covered in syrupy sugar. The chocolate marzipan-like bar was soft and crumbly and didn’t taste like any chocolate I’d ever had. We also had a light and sweet cashew cookie called kaju katli. And my favorite was a clear, slimy but firm white pumpkin stick. It’s a tough one to explain (and I can’t find the name of it anywhere on the internet) but the textures were surprising and pleasing, while the flavor was rich, slightly sweet, and reminded me of a sweet water chestnut. Strange, huh?

But the most famous Indian dessert is Gulab Jamun. I like to say it with a Jamaican accent, which may be offensive somehow (Gulab Jamun, mon!) These are the desserts I’ve gotten with my Indian take-out in the past. And the dish that was on Time Out’s list. We got two and took them to go.

For those that don’t know, gulab jamun are little balls made from milk solids, deep fried, and then covered with sugar water, rosewater, cardamom, and other fragrant spices. Basically they’re Indian doughnuts. But they have a milkier, softer feel closer to baklava. They should sort of melt in your mouth, but still have a firm doughy texture.

These were not as sweet as others I’ve tasted and I probably would have loved the novelty of them if it was my first experience with gulab jamun. The aromatic, floral notes were rather subtle. The textures were firm, fresh but a little grainy – closer to cornbread.

I preferred many of the Indian desserts I’d never experienced from Al Naimat. I felt like a kid in a candy store who was forced to eat the same candy once again. It was a fine take on gulab jamun, but I’ve had ones just as good from my local Indian restaurant. Which shouldn’t surprise anybody since I do live in New York, where you can get anything anywhere.

Would Al Naimat Restaurant & Sweets’ Gulab Jamun make my Top 100 of the year? If I had never tasted this delight before, maybe. They get a 7 out of 10 for being delicious and fresh, but I’d much prefer some of those unknown and foreign sweets.