CHECK, PLEASE!(The Talk of the Town)(restaurants)

Diners browsing their options on Macdougal Street who happened upon a restaurant called Babu in its first few weeks of opening, earlier this year, were met with several surprises. The first was the incongruity of finding a place like Babu--which is candlelit and hushed--in a strip of the Village better known for falafels and Formica tables. The second was the unfamiliarity of the cuisine, which comes from Calcutta and draws upon the traditions of the many different ethnic groups that have made that city their home, from the Chinese (shrimp toasts with sesame) to the Muslim (mutton cooked with yogurt) to the Bengali (fish steamed with mustard and green chili, wrapped in a banana leaf) to the British (fish-and-chips).

The third surprise was that the menu came without prices. Instead, guests were invited to eat, enjoy, and then, at the end of the meal, pay what they thought it was worth. "I'd rather work out the kinks in the kitchen first," Payal Saha, the restaurant's owner, explained the other day, sitting at a corner table of Babu, which was about a quarter full of couples quietly eating and mentally calculating the value of their experience.

Saha, who is thirty and a native of Calcutta, moved to New York from Bombay in 2000 with her husband, who works in advertising and also serves as Babu's informal maitre d'. "I don't have the money to hire topline staff, so everyone has to learn," Saha said. "And it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths if they have to pay and things don't go right." (The wine and liquor list does come with prices, and a check is delivered for them.) "I have assumed that everyone will pay me zero," she said.

The pay-what-you-like policy has caused a certain amount of anxiety among diners, much as the pay-what-you-wish policy at, say, the Metropolitan Museum can cause crises of conscience in the face of a ticket-taking docent's all-knowing gaze. Only the gauche or exploitative would interpret such an invitation as an opportunity to feed for free; the problem, for the civilized remainder, is the lack of an established code of behavior to follow. The standard meaning, in movies and cartoons, at least, of a missing price tag--if you have to ask, you can't afford it--is clearly not the governing principle at Babu; but figuring out what the ...