NYC NOW - July 18, 2024: Midday News

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

New legislation before the City Council could soon require that New York landlords provide air conditioning units to renters or face hefty fines. Also, city officials confirm that a C-130 aircraft with the Arkansas Air National Guard will fly over New York City Thursday afternoon. Finally, WNYC’s Sean Carlson speaks with chef and food writer Farideh Sadeghin and chef Param Bombra, owner of Gulaabo, about their day eating in New York’s “Little Punjab” community in Richmond Hill, Queens.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Thursday, July 18th. Here's the midday news. New legislation before the city council soon could require New York renters get air conditioning units from their landlords. Brooklyn City Council member Lincoln Wrestler says he plans to introduce a bill today that requires landlords to provide AC units to tenants during the hot summer months or face-seller. hefty fines. We, you know, require that landlords provide heating in the winter to keep tenants safe. The climate crisis now requires us to ensure that landlords provide cooling in the summer to keep

tenant safe as well. If enacted landlords would need to ensure apartments can stay at 78 degrees when it's 82 degrees or hotter outside. If you just saw what looks like a massive military plane flying over New York City this hour, no need for concern. The city says the flyover was planned for the C-130 of the Arkansas National Guard. 82 and mostly sunny now. Partly sunny today is still hot up to 88, and then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, we have sunshine in the forecast and high temperatures in the upper 80s. This is WNYC.

Stay close. There's more after the break. I'm Sean Carlson for WNYC. Richmond Hill, Queens, has a large Punjabi population. That's the region of South Asia that stretches across the borders of what are now Indian Pakistan. And the neighborhood also features an abundance of Punjabi stores and restaurants. And of the few Gurdwara's in the city, places of worship in Sikhism where many residents gather. Joining us now to talk more about Punjabi food in Richmond Hill is chef and food writer Faraday Sadigan. She's been bringing us regular stories of New York neighborhoods through food and culture.

We're also joined by Param Bambra, chef of Gulabu, a Punjabi restaurant in Times Square. Param, can you tell us about what makes Punjabi cuisine? Like, what makes it special? To make it special, there's three flavors, which usually we do it all the time whenever we cook Punjabi cuisine. It's sweet, spicy, and tanginess. Because the other part of India, they don't do all three things together. There's only a Punjabi's. Can you tell us more about what a Goroadwara is and the one that you stopped at Richmond, him?

It's a religious place. called it a Punjabi or Sikh temple. Guru means any prophet and doara means a door where the God lives. And we all go worship there every Sundays. After our 10th Guru, Guru Govind Singhji, has told us there will be no other prophet coming in the world. So what you need to do is need to follow the Guru Gran Sahib, the book, holy book. One thing I found really interesting too about the Gujarra, but we didn't get to go inside, but they serve food. Food is free, like an offer to everyone daily throughout the day.

And anyone can go in and eat that food and work there and volunteer, which I thought was really interesting. That's called Sava. All religion can sit down and eat together. So it shows that there's nobody beneath anyone. Okay, you guys have provided the perfect segue here. Let's get into the food that you both tried. Your first stop was Punjabi Daba. Can you tell us about the entrees you got there?

Yeah, it was amazing. We tried these samosas, which samosas, I think a lot of people probably. are very familiar with that. They're little triangle-shaped pastries that are usually deep-fried. They're filled with like a mashed potato, spiced mashed potatoes and peas. We're able to walk into the back into the kitchen and see them forming them, which was really cool. And we also had the bread pecoras, which I'd also never had before.

They also have mashed potato-style filling, but it's sandwich between two pieces of bread and then dipped in a chickpea batter and deep-bred, and then cut into triangles. And there's a chop masala that gets sprinkled on top. That's the best part. Like the bread pagoda is, of course, it's a very unique dish. I mean, people does eat sandwiches, but we fried our sandwiches. Now, people started doing with the cheese inside, the slice of cheese, tomatoes,

or maybe cucumber with all the potatoes, then layered and then dipped in the chickpe flour, fried for a certain temperature, and serves with mint chutney or maybe tamarin chutney along with it. Very unique. You tried the salted lassie and introduced me to that, which is very different in what you guys. usually drink that is to help cool you off and also helps with digestion. Punjabi cuisine is way too rich, way too greasy with a lot of oil and butter. So you need something to settle down in your stomach, right? And during the summer it's way too difficult to digest also.

You should have a salted lussey, which is a yogurt and a water equal ratio, very thin with some fannigriac powder or maybe cumin powder roasted, with some cilantro, salt, thin in a texture, and you keep drinking a lot with the food. Now Faraday, you met the owner of Punjabi Dhabara, right? Yes, we met Navdip Singh. So he's the owner, he's the one... Naf. Naf.

Yeah, nice-witching here. What's a Punjabi name? Punjabi name is Naveep. So his name is Naveep Singh, but he become a very modernized now, so his name is Nav. It's easy, you know what I'm saying? They don't know how it is. Yeah, and he explains some of the popular dishes that they serve at their restaurant. The Sholeipura, the chana masala basically, right, of the curry, that's the name of it.

It's like a sweet and tangy type of flavor in it. chickpeas. It's like a tomato-based gravy. And then the patura, it's like a leveled bread made out of an all-purpose flour. It's like fried and it comes around and all that. A lot of people often think the Punjabi cuisine is being really spicy, but Navdiv explained that that's not really the case. Like I was at the Queensland Market. I recently started doing it and everyone's just like, oh, Indian spicy, spicy. It's spicy. And I'm just like, it's not spicy. It's not spicy,

you know. Try something different, you know, it's not spicy at all. any thoughts, problem on that? Yes, I do. I do. Yes, people have that misconception about the Indian foods. So we've got many regions. Like few reasons people does eat a lot of spicy, especially like Karnataka or Andrabah, which is south of India. But when I consider something which is in northern part of India, like Punjabi or UP cuisine, or especially like Kashmiri cuisine, those are more flavorful than the spices. We does use spicy chilies to make the curry look red in the color. But that doesn't give you the spiciness. But at the same time, it is more of a flavorful, like caramam, bay leaf, clove, cinnamon, maize, nutmade.

All those flavors make Indian food very unique. Can you tell us about the desserts that you guys tried? On the very first restaurant, like the Punjabi Dhaba, we had a brown sugar burfi. It's made out of our reduced milk, majorly used in Punjabi region. So it's like a sweet cake, like a marshmallow, but in a brown color. Yeah, it was amazing. And here's Nadip actually describing his favorite dessert. My favorite one is the ladus, the yellow, right?

These loon right here. It's like small droplets of gran flour, and it's soaked in sugar. And like, to make it round, you got to make the sugar hard. As always, I'm going to leave this segment being super hungry. I'm going to go eat as soon as we're off the air here. That was chef and food writer Faraday Sadigan and Pram Bambra, the chef of Glabo, a Punjabi restaurant in Times Square. Thank you both for joining us.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from Brombe. WMYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. More soon.