One hundred perfect momos a day

The long version

How it started, and how it has stayed

Target Momo House began at a kitchen table in Jackson Heights, Queens. Anjali Shrestha folded momos there on Sunday afternoons for whoever turned up — fourteen pleats, worked the way her grandmother had taught her in Boudha, with a filling she kept adjusting week after week. The Sundays got crowded. Eventually people started asking whether they could pay her to do it on a Tuesday as well.

The first restaurant opened on Lexington Avenue with fourteen seats, one steamer stack and a menu of six items. The name came from a scrap of paper taped above the stove: one hundred perfect momos a day. It took four months of long mornings to hit that number consistently, and it set the pace for everything that came afterwards. When a regular asked whether the momos could come in soup — the way he had eaten them on a trek near Namche — the kitchen spent a whole winter on the broth before putting jhol momo on the menu. Eight hours, tomato, sesame and timur pepper. It has never come off since.

Three kitchens later, in New York, Falls Church and Richardson, the recipe book and the rule are both unchanged: a new location opens when somebody who already knows the fold is ready to run it, and not a month sooner. Every momo is still folded by hand, every morning, before the doors open. A fourth kitchen is in early planning and a small line of house chili oil is being tested, but we are in no particular hurry. The target above the stove is still the same one, and it is still about the momo, not the map.