On Calabash’s opening dinner menu, Hoppin’ John takes the form of dolma: collard leaves wrapped around black-eyed peas and ham hock. The ingredients offer one point of recognition; the shape offers another. Together, they suggest how much room there is inside a familiar dish for a cook’s own ideas.
That possibility runs through Calabash, the Afro-Caribbean bakery and brasserie that chef Camari Mick opened in October 2026 at 183 Christopher Street in New York’s West Village. Her first restaurant of her own draws on the foodways of West Africa, the Caribbean and the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Its name comes from a vessel used across the African diaspora, an apt starting point for a place concerned with what people carry and what they make from it.
The restaurant’s opening press materials describe a project shaped by Mick’s childhood, Jamaican American heritage and French culinary training. Those influences meet in dishes that give memory a new form, with a bakery, an art program and plans for community dinners extending the idea beyond the evening menu.
Camari Mick brings her experience to Calabash
Mick’s career has taken her through The Musket Room, Raf’s, Le Bernardin, Thomas Keller’s TAK Room and Daniel Boulud’s db Bistro Moderne. She was named one of Food & Wine’s 2024 Best New Chefs, recognition earned before this move into a restaurant built around her own vision.
At Calabash, that experience has a wider canvas. The decisions encompass the morning pastry case, the structure of dinner, the drinks and the artists whose work diners encounter. A chef’s point of view can take shape across an entire address.
Working alongside Mick is chef de cuisine Tajeh Porter, who previously led the kitchen at Brooklyn’s Nura. A 2025 StarChefs New York City Rising Stars award winner, Porter brings experience from kitchens in New York and Las Vegas. The opening materials describe the two chefs’ approaches as distinct and complementary, joined here by an interest in the foodways of the African diaspora.
A menu connecting West Africa and the Caribbean
The opening five-course dinner menu makes those connections specific. Alongside the Hoppin’ John dolma are chicken liver pâté with sorrel and red snapper with sweet corn and an étouffée-style gravy. Crispy pork belly is paired with tahdig jollof, green mango chow chow and bitter greens.
Daytime service offers another way into the kitchen’s thinking. Naturally fermented breads and laminated pastries sit alongside seasonal breakfast dishes. The opening lunch and brunch menu includes suya steak with maduros, cornbread pancakes with salted maple sabayon, and freshly marinated sardines with Trinidadian bake and tomatillo chow.
For someone planning a West Village visit, that range is useful. Calabash can fit a morning devoted to pastry and coffee or an evening organized around a longer meal. The bakery gives Mick’s pastry background a continuing place in the daily life of the restaurant.
Calabash serves no alcohol. Its opening beverage program includes house-fermented mocktails and nonalcoholic wines, alongside coffee and tea sourced from African countries.
Contemporary art shares the dining room
Washington, D.C.-based Drummond Projects designed the space. Its art program is curated by New York gallerist Cierra Britton, whose gallery centers the work of BIPOC women artists.
According to the restaurant’s opening materials, Britton’s selections bring the work of Black and brown artists into conversation with the food and its cultural references. That collaboration gives Calabash another set of authors. The chefs shape what comes to the table; the artists contribute their own ways of seeing.
A plan for a more accessible table
Calabash also plans to host a monthly Pay What You Can dinner. The announced format will vary, from collaborations with visiting chefs to family-style meals inspired by the culinary team’s traditions. Guests will pay what they can, with reservations released to the restaurant’s email subscribers.
The planned dinners make the question of who can afford a meal part of the restaurant’s approach to hospitality. Alongside its regular service, Calabash is proposing another way for people to gather around the team’s cooking.
Calabash’s opening menu returns to that interplay between inheritance and possibility. A collard leaf can hold black-eyed peas and ham hock. A bakery can make room for an evening tasting menu. A chef’s first restaurant can gather the places she has worked and the traditions she has carried, then give them an address of their own.
Visiting Calabash in the West Village
Calabash is at 183 Christopher Street, New York, NY 10014. Its official website lists coffee service Thursday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., brunch from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and dinner Friday and Saturday at 6:30 p.m.
Check Calabash’s reservation page for available dinner dates, seating times and current menus. As of October 22, 2026, its dinner experience is listed at $175 per person, with nonalcoholic drinks included. Confirm the current hours, price and booking terms when reserving.
For restaurant news and announcements about the planned Pay What You Can dinners, join the mailing list through Calabash’s website.
This feature draws on opening press materials supplied to Liberated Paths by Calabash’s representative, supplemented by published sources. It is not a dining review.
Related reading: Chef Demetrius Brown Is Building the Dining Room He Couldn’t Find.