Seinfeld: The Cafe

(S03E07) Ah, Babu Bhatt. He's got to be one of my favorite Seinfeld side characters of all time. He only appeared in three episodes, one of which was the finale that brought back almost every peripheral character in the show's history. How can you not feel bad for the guy? He opens a restaurant that no one goes to. He takes Jerry's advice to remake it as a Pakistani restaurant. Still no one comes. Maybe his mistake was listening to Jerry in the first place. But he'll make that mistake again in the Season Four episode "The Visa", so fool me once, etc., etc.

This is one of those good four-plot episodes: Kramer is being chased by a former boyfriend of his mom's, all for a snazzy jacket; Elaine takes an IQ test for George, who's taking it for his current girlfriend and doesn't want to look like a moron. And, of course, there's Jerry and Babu.

Of course, who can forget the Babu "finger wag," as he tells Jerry that he's a "good man" and a "very very bad man"?

Ok, on to the "awards":

Best line: After Elaine takes the IQ test and only gets an 85 due to distractions, Jerry tries to snidely allay her concerns: "Well, maybe the test was gender biased, you know a lot of questions about hunting and testicles..."
Best facial expression: When Jerry comes back from his trip and goes to Babu's new Pakistani restaurant, Babu's so angry with him that he glares at Jerry from across the room as Jerry eats.
Best Kramerism: The backflip Kramer does over his chair after Babu gives him a hot towel that's way too hot.

Observations and info from the DVD:

• The third-season streetscape set was so small that Jerry and George are actually looking next door instead of across the street when Jerry talks about the Dream Café.
• Both the Jerry/Babu plot and the George/Elaine plot are based on incidents in writer Tom Leopold's life. The real Dream Café was a failing Vietnamese place near where Leopold lived in New York City. And he actually had to take an IQ test for a girlfriend who was a psychology student.
• Brian George, who played Babu, has had an extremely long and varied career, including voice work for cartoons such as Justice League and Kim Possible. The character of Babu was originally written as more of an Asian character, but was changed to Babu Bhatt after George auditioned.
• There was a happier ending in the original script, where the restaurateur's wife came out wearing an aristocratic riding uniform. It would turn out that he was rich and was just trying the restaurant on a lark. But they decided to cut that ending and make Babu a recent immigrant who gets ruined by the closing of his restaurant.

I happen to think the second Babu episode, "The Visa", is better than this one. But this one is good nonetheless. And every so often, I still wag my finger and say the words "You are a very bad man!", so it must have worked for me on some level.