At Nepali Bhanchha Ghar, Splendor Comes Served on a Plate

The doughnuts are skinny and rough, a stack of crooked halos. Called sel roti, they’re made at Nepali Bhanchha Ghar in Jackson Heights, Queens, with a batter of crushed rice, sugar and ghee (clarified butter), scooped with a sawed-off soda bottle and poured in the shape of a ring, into a pan of spitting oil.

Instantly, the ring sets. It has to be turned constantly so it doesn’t sink, then fished out with a stick, the fried dough puffed and golden, its surface riddled with bumps.

Time your order right, and the sel roti will land on your plate still breathing, almost too hot to touch. Tear off an arc, and it’s equal parts crispness and cloud, with just enough sugar to register as sweet.

Yamuna Shrestha opened Nepali Bhanchha Ghar in 2015. Raised in Syangja, west of Kathmandu, she is one of a number of immigrants from Nepal who have come to Queens in the past 20 years, driven in part by their country’s decadelong civil war, which ultimately toppled the monarchy. Many settled in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood that has drawn South Asians for about half a century.

Her brother, Shree Shrestha, is the chef. He oversees a cluttered galley kitchen, with pots mounted one atop the other on the stove, and sel roti seething in a corner. A few tables offer front-row seats to the clamor. Downstairs, there’s a larger dining room, albeit equally stark in lighting and mood.

No matter, because you’re here for splendors like Wai Wai sandheko, a heap of dry instant noodles — made by Wai Wai, a Nepal-based company — straight from the package, strafed with tomato, onion, cilantro and green chile. It crunches and stings, and then the heat of the raw chiles blooms, blindsiding, extorting a pause between mouthfuls.

More calming is dhedo, a minimalist mixture of buckwheat and millet flours added to boiling water and stirred constantly to ensure that the edges don’t catch and blacken. In texture, it suggests bread interrupted, taken from the oven before its time. Made without spices or oil, it’s almost comfortingly null in flavor, gently muffling the intensities of the curries and pickles that surround it on a thali platter.

A smaller-scale version of a thali, built as an appetizer, is samaya bajee, anchored by a compartment of what look like tiny ossified angel wings. This is beaten rice, made from grains soaked, roasted and pounded in a mortar until they shed their husks and bran, leaving only flat flakes that crackle.

Accompanying it are fried soybeans, salty and hot, and pickles: fermented radish, burnished by turmeric, and bitter gourd that outdoes its name, its bitterness so deep, it makes all the flavors that follow sharper and brighter.

The pleasures of meat — including hunks of goat still clinging to the bone, and sukuti, beef air-dried for 36 hours in-house, then revived in a pan so it’s chewy and succulent at once — are here found not in tenderness, but resistance. Teeth are pressed into service, in the old animal way. Everything requires a little gnawing, and is worth it.

Once a year, during the annual Momo Crawl, this block of 37th Road is thronged by pilgrims in search of New York’s finest momos, dumplings with furrows like the shoulders of mountains. Last fall, Nepali Bhanchha Ghar won Best Momo in Town, as attested by the trophy on the kitchen wall: a yak-hide belt adorned with a gold-painted momo and a stone from Mount Everest, known as Sagarmatha in Nepali and as Jomolungma by the Sherpas who live in its shadow.

Momos are available steamed and fried, but the winning version was jhol momo, dumplings resting in a chutney of broken-down tomatoes, sesame seeds and chicken broth. It’s so loose and liquidy that it could qualify as soup. The dumplings themselves come generously packed with beef or chicken, their juices pent up.

They’re delicious — but so are the ones next door at Potala, and upstairs at Phayul, and across the street at the Amdo Kitchen truck. There are momos throughout the neighborhood, each with folds and flavors unique to its maker. In this city of plenty, how will I ever try them all?