If you ever had the pleasure of eating at Momofuku Ko, the wonderful, ambitious, and sometimes sort of compellingly bizarre tasting-menu restaurant that closed in 2023, it can be a little disorienting to visit Kabawa, a new fine-dining Caribbean spot occupying Ko’s former space in the East Village. The room, once decorated in severe tones of black and gray, has received a warm makeover, with bright paint and tropical mosaics. But the large open kitchen that takes up most of the room is the same—with cooks’ stations encircling a central vent that’s dramatically cantilevered, like the funnel of a cruise ship—as is the seating, much of it arranged around a sweeping U-shaped counter. One of the things I remember most clearly from Ko was the peculiar way that certain smells rolled around the boxy space like billiard balls—a cloud of sweet lychee in the air by a few window tables, or a whiff of Searzall butane hovering over the dead center of the dining counter. At Kabawa, the tumbling kittens of aroma include fresh yeast, green cucumber, and a perpetual bouquet of toasty curry leaves.

Little exists to inform you that you’re in a Momofuku joint—not a mote of branding nor a trace of David Chang, the company’s überfamous chef and founder. For kremlinologists of the Momofuku empire (and there are more of us out there than you might think), this is both notable and unsurprising: Chang has always seemed to have a deeply ambivalent relationship with his own success. (In “Eat a Peach,” his memoir, published in 2020, he writes rawly about irresistible tendencies toward self- and other kinds of destruction, including bouts of rage directed at his employees and loved ones.) Over the past few years, Chang has stepped back from day-to-day operations at Momofuku; the company, which now includes an ever-growing portfolio of grocery products, is run by its C.E.O., Marguerite Zabar Mariscal. Kabawa’s chef, Paul Carmichael, is a longtime veteran of Momofuku, and was recently announced as overseeing all of the group’s restaurants—a signal, perhaps, that the company (which has contracted over the past half decade to some half-dozen spots) is interested in anchoring its identity on something more than the stature of its founder. At Kabawa, one of the only signs of the place’s connection to Chang is a stack of old issues of Lucky Peach, the brilliant, defunct food magazine he co-founded, resting on a high-up kitchen shelf.

Carmichael, a native of Barbados, cooked under blue-chip chefs such as Marcus Samuelsson and Wylie Dufresne before being hired by Chang, in 2010, at the now closed midtown Momofuku restaurant Má Pêche. After five years there, he moved to the other side of the world to take over at Momofuku Seiobo, in Sydney, Australia, where he evolved the menu’s European-Asian-Whatever palate to reflect his particular passion for the food of the Caribbean. Seiobo raked in awards before closing during the pandemic. Chang told me recently that in Australia Carmichael became “like David Hasselhoff”: a mega-celeb and a national treasure, recognized everywhere he went (not to mention one of a relatively tiny number of prominent Black people in Aussie public life).

In the U.S., Carmichael’s profile remains considerably lower-key, even among food people, but Kabawa—and Bar Kabawa, a more casual companion spot next door with a killer lineup of tiki drinks and a dizzying variety of Caribbean patties—makes clear that he possesses both formidable creativity and a fairly luminous charisma. Whether presiding in the kitchen or joking easily with customers, he is the restaurant’s gravitational center: wearing the staff uniform of a tie-dye apron, his long locs secured with a bandanna, he exudes the quiet affability of someone who knows he’s showing you a good time. At Bar Kabawa, when regulars walk in the door—or someone orders a particularly exciting cocktail, or he’s just kind of in a spirited mood—he rings a shiny brass bell.