Momos — the crimped and spiced dumplings from the Himalayan countries of Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and parts of India — are the star of the day at the 12th annual Momo Crawl in Jackson Heights this Sunday.
For the uninitiated, momos come in delicious variations: steamed, fried or swimming in a spicy soup; stuffed with beef, goat or potato; seasoned with soy sauce or ginger; shaped into rounds or crescents; served with chile-tomato dipping sauce.
Twenty-four vendors from the Himalayan community of Jackson Heights will be serving a variety of momos on Sunday, when fans can vote for the best momo.
The crawl’s popularity has exploded over the past decade. In 2012, it drew just 30 attendees, while last year, it counted 2,000 in a downpour, according to Rinzin Thonden of Students for a Free Tibet, which is organizing the event.
For vendors, this has been good for business.
“The crawl made a vast difference,” said Tsering Rabgyal, owner of Om Wok, which won the momo contest in 2022.
“We have a much larger fan base outside of our Nepali, Tibetan and Indian people — the people who used to come before the crawl,” Rabgyal said.
The growing popularity of the Momo Crawl mirrors larger trends in New York City, where locals are catching on to Himalayan food. And the city’s Nepalese population is among the fastest-growing groups, tripling between 2010 and 2019.
Thonden said he’d observed a huge uptick in the number of Himalayan places across the five boroughs since childhood. He remembers the first Tibetan restaurant in the city, Tibet Kitchen, which opened with traditional recipes in 1981 in Manhattan. He would know: His grandmother ran it.
Now, a Yelp search lists about 70 Himalayan restaurants in Queens, where the majority of the community resides, and a dozen in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Still more are popping up in the city.
New restaurants, like Lakeside in Jackson Heights and Newa Chhe in Sunnyside (outside of the crawl’s circuit), dig deeper into regional cuisine and indigenous Newari culture.
Today’s Himalayan restaurants feature influences from across the globe. Nangma in Elmhurst has Sichuan dishes like dan dan noodles. Wasabi Point in Elmhurst shows Japanese influences in its ramen and udon. Cafe Catmandoo offers historically white-American classics like hamburgers.
The city’s first full-service Bhutanese restaurant, Zhego, opened in 2023 and will be churning out its particular brand of momos from the country’s dairy-heavy cuisine.
Chef-owner Tobden Jamphel is already prepping his momos with cabbage and a mix of feta and mozzarella cheeses (an approximation of a Bhutanese cheese that’s unavailable here) and cooking up a spicy chile-tomato dipping sauce.
Among the popular momo spots in town, Momo Crave perhaps best represents innovativeness with nine versions of the dumplings, including a taco momo topped with avocado and black-bean paste. The restaurant will be participating in the crawl.
Om Wok’s winning momo from 2022 and 2023 is a super-sized dumpling for which eaters use a straw to sip the hot soup inside.
For Rinzin Thonden, who organizes the crawl, the momo — as mouthwateringly good as it is — is a gateway to other Himalayan cuisines.
“So many people come from all across the city to participate in this one crawl, but it’s the one day a year that they come out to Jackson Heights, Queens,” Thonden said. “And I hope they remember that these restaurants do exist all year round, and a lot of them actually serve way more than just momos.”
The Momo Crawl runs from 12 p.m. to 4:30 p.m on Sunday, Sept. 15. A $15 “passport” grants access to momos from a variety of vendors for $1 a piece. Passport sales and pickups open at 11:45 a.m. at Diversity Plaza — 37th Road between 73rd and 74th streets — in Jackson Heights. The ballot box for best momo closes at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday.