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FOODNOTE

Monday, June 2, 2014
This is BAKU restaurant in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, offering Nigerian traditional cuisine. (By the way, the off Broadway theater company Jack is a couple of blocks away on Waverly Pl. at Fulton. An idea where to eat after a show.)

I started with a cocktail infusion of guava juice and white rum on the rocks, served pink and sweet, called "Go Slow." The appetizer I chose to go with it (fried white yams cut like French fries) was very interesting in terms of its dip: smoky (with moderate heat) red bell peppers braised to its oil. The combination is "dynamite!" - to borrow a Lynne Rossetto Kasper expression - and very distinctive, with the interplay of guava and coconut rum with the yam tasting like Japanese taro but smothered.

For my main dish - a grilled, whole red snapper with tomato rice (I had actually commented on the spice rub used on it to the owner afterwards and he explained was a mixture of powdered dried ginger and peanuts and indigenous herbs - oh wow - I ended up buying some), and what's noticing about it was how it made a freshness and tenderness and flavor to the fish that didn't require a "lemon" to lift its taste. It was fresh-catch simple yet enlighteningly... I don't know ... "African." I had never had a fish dish without some measure of citrus or acidity to it, so, yes, the degree to which it had broken down standard taste practices, why my appetite grew from hunger to wonder! In the end I have fossilized the fish to my heart's content - you just have to imagine. (I am already thinking about using the spice rub for a country pork chop breakfast, or a baked-clam soup.) Please, go slow.  

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