Princess perch

Kashi (Downtown Brooklyn)

RESTAURANTS • First Person

First Person brings a FOUND correspondent’s personal experience to the story of an interesting, often recently opened, restaurant.

“This is the princess table,” the host told us as we were seated at Kashi on a recent Friday night.

Even with a reservation, it seemed lucky to get any table at the new Northern Indian restaurant in Downtown Brooklyn, where devil-may-care pop-ins crowded just inside the doors and even out on the sidewalk in increasing numbers. So we gratefully settled into an improbably cozy two-top with a cuddly pair of club chairs by a big window up front — even if the determined waitlist on the other side of the glass eyed us not like royalty but like the barriers to entry we were.

Inside, a petite bar nests on the western wall under ornate, dainty light fixtures, and a long banquette sits below a colorful mural a few dozen paces to the east. Studiously constructed cocktails like the paan old-fashioned came out crowned with the titular green leaf plus a winding orange peel and rose water drops ($20 per). Non-alcoholic drinks are also given their due. The Roohafza Dhamaka mingles its own sweet, bright red namesake with coconut syrup, pineapple juice, and Sprite, to a shockingly pleasant just-this-side-of-candy-coated effect (that’d be great with vodka, nonetheless).