Meet New York’s new mayor who once rapped about chapati

Zohran Mamdani might now be the freshly elected mayor of New York City, but before the campaign trail, he had quite the foodie and hip-hop journey, and food played a starring role. Performing under the stage name Young Cardamom, Mamdani rapped about food, identity, and belonging, often using Indian staples as cultural shorthand.

Mamdani’s early music career leaned into cultural signposts — cardamom being the most obvious — as both a wink to South Asian flavour and a catchy stage identity. That foodie flair shows up in the way his songs and videos riff on home-cooking, family stories and the everyday rituals around food. Rolling Stone and The Washington Post have both traced how his artistic output used musical flavour and humour to talk about identity and belonging.

The Chapati song
One of the clearest food callbacks in his discography is “Kanda (Chap Chap)”, a track he released with collaborator HAB under the Young Cardamom banner that cheekily celebrates chapati/roti culture. The music video, part homage, part comic love letter to a humble flatbread, became a small cult hit online. News profiles and music write-ups point to that song as a good example of how Mamdani folded domestic, desi food imagery into his early artistic persona.

Mamdani’s creative reach also brushed up against film: Work connected to the “Queen of Katwe” soundtrack and other collaborations placed him in a zone where global stories, diasporic flavours and music overlapped. Teen Vogue and other outlets have documented how those cross-cultural projects helped set the tone for his youthful, multimedia approach. If politics is theatre, Mamdani’s stage once included songs and beats in which food was a recurring prop.

For food writers and lovers, this is deliciously neat: a political figure who didn’t just grow up around Indian cuisine but deliberately used its imagery and vocabulary in art that reached non-South Asian audiences. Songs about chapati, a stage name of cardamom and music videos that celebrate roti culture all show how food can serve as shorthand for heritage, humour and home.