LORE – a Mangalore childhood, retold on a Park Slope corner

LORE occupies a corner storefront at the base of a residential building where 7th Avenue meets 15th Street in Park Slope, a short walk from Prospect Park. It holds a Bib Gourmand, the MICHELIN Guide's distinction for carefully judged cooking at a fair price, a rating LORE has carried since 2024 and kept into the 2025-2026 guide. The dining room opened to the public on 7 February 2022, deep in the pandemic, in the corner location of 7th Avenue and 15th Street, as a partnership between chef and owner Jay Kumar and chef John Kim, who set out to build a seasonal menu around their own diverse backgrounds. Kumar grew up in Mangalore, on India's south-western coast, trained for two decades in Switzerland, and now cooks a few streets from the Brooklyn brownstone where his wife grew up. The result is a short, twenty-five-seat room that reads less like a fusion experiment than a chef's own biography, plated.

01The chef

Jay Kumar was born in Mangalore and learned to cook as a boy, raised largely by his grandmother and aunt, who let him into the kitchen even though sons in his family were not usually expected there. He moved from India to Switzerland in 1989 for hospitality and culinary school, then worked in Dubai and England before settling in Basel, where he opened three restaurants over the following twenty years, including a namesake address known for the depth and complexity of its progressive Indian cooking. In 2019 he met his future wife, who is from Brooklyn, and the two decided to move to New York, eventually opening LORE together with chef John Kim.

02The cooking

Kim arrived with his own résumé: opening chef de cuisine of the Equinox Hotel and of Electric Lemon, and for two years chef de cuisine at The Finch, where the kitchen held a MICHELIN star under his tenure. Between Kumar's Mangalorean memory and Kim's training, the menu refuses to settle on one country. A ribeye steak au poivre arrives with masala butter, a lobster tail is served with upma, and a sea bream is dressed as a Korean ssam but marinated first in Malabar spices from India's south-western coast. On the opening menu in 2022 there were radishes with spiced honey and cultured butter, dosas with red lentil dal and coconut chutney, and smoked trout with pickled cipollini, onion purée, breadcrumbs and trout roe — small plates that still define the kitchen's instinct for crossing continents without losing a single ingredient's origin.

Insider tip

Closed Mondays; $47 three-course prix fixe; brunch weekends 11am–2pm.

03What to order

The dish Kumar refuses to retire is the fermented dosa: rice, lentils and fenugreek are soaked, blended, then left to ferment for a full day before the batter is cooked to order, giving the crisp-outside, fluffy-inside texture he grew up eating at least four days a week in Mangalore. It comes with masala potatoes made to his father's own recipe, alongside coconut, tomato and daal chutneys and a dusting of gunpowder spice. The seared scallops, served over tadka-spiced yogurt rice with housemade mango chutney and curry leaves, began as a kitchen experiment and is now the best-selling dish on the menu. Duck leg confit, cooked slowly in fat scented with garam masala, ginger and cardamom, is plated with a turmeric cannellini bean purée and a coconut-amino, tamarind sauce — a dish that traces back to a small Alsatian kitchen near Basel. For dessert, the ganache cake pairs warm chocolate sauce with spirulina ice cream and cardamom salt.

04Wine and drinks

The cocktail list carries its own literary conceit, with each drink named after a poet from outside Europe and the Americas and a line of their work printed above the description. The Basho stirs Mar Iwai 45 whisky with gunpowder tea, jaggery, bitters and maple smoke; the Kahlo mixes Rosaluna mezcal and Arette tequila with passion fruit and Thai chilli; and the Parker, built on vodka and sumac, is finished with rooh afza, the rose-and-herb cordial found across South Asia.

05When to go and booking

LORE is closed on Mondays. Dinner runs Tuesday to Friday from 6pm to 10pm, with weekend service extended to include brunch: Saturday from 11am to 2pm and again from 6pm to 10pm, Sunday from 11am to 2pm and 6pm to 9pm, as published on the restaurant's own website in October 2026. A three-course prix fixe of one starter, one main and one dessert is offered at $47 per person. The room has stayed a genuine neighbourhood fixture — the kind of place where you feel comfortable coming in alone to eat at the bar, with a date, with children for a Sunday supper, or with a group large enough to work through the entire menu. Kumar has since opened FOLK, a cocktail bar around the corner that extends the same storytelling into Park Slope's nightlife, and in summer he runs a dosa-only stall at the Smorgasburg market in Prospect Park.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.