Category Archives: African

Vancouver World Tour: Africa

Posted on February 2, 2011 by | 3 Comments

African cuisine is a diverse as the countryside; iron-rich injera and Indian-influenced dishes on the East coast to couscous and tagines in the North, South African cured biltong and okra and yams in the West. Vancouver doesn’t have all that many African restaurants – the preponderance of which are Ethiopian/East African – but I tried to cover them all. Unfortunately, after months of trying to get to Lagos Corner Nigerian, they were closed. I’m going to keep trying and I’ll add it in when I finally get there, but blog-wise I want to move on to the next region: the Middle East.

See below for African reviews or if you have a favourite Middle Eastern restaurant in Vancouver, please tell me about it.

Africa:

South African: African Breese Imports

Ethiopia: Fassil

Tunisian: Carthage Cafe

East African: Simba’s Grill

Nigerian: Lagos Corner Nigerian Restaurant, 7546 Edmonds Street

 

Please also see Harambe and Red Sea Cafe. I’ve tried several dishes at Nyala but found the food and service to be not worth reporting on.

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Jambo Grill & Good Morning Paan

Posted on December 7, 2010 by | 1 Comment

potato puffs
Vancouver World Tour > Africa > Uganda.

With all the busyness of trying to get everything done before having knee surgery, I was finding it hard to get to any of the farther afield African restaurants on my list, but I was looking forward to Jambo Grill & Good Morning Paan. Jambo is a Swahili word meaning ‘hello’ and paan is an Indian dish, a betel leaf filled with sweets and nuts and with all the multi-ethnic welcoming, I was expecting deliciousness.

Like Simba’s the menu here is a mix of Indian and East African. The menu explains:

The dishes at Jambo Grill and Khoja style, which is quite different from other Indian style dishes. Khoja’s followers of the Ismaili Branch of Shia sect of Islam, our forefathers in India, were converted to Islam by the Dais from Iran. Thus, there is a strong Persian and Gujarati influence evident in our cooking…Around the 1920′s the Khoja settled in large numbers in East Africa before immigrating to Canada in the 1970′s. Certain African style dishes such as Cassava and Tilapia Fish are influences from that continent. Also cooking on the grill (Sigdi) was very common in East Africa.

I was seated with four menus, presumably to cover off this range of cuisines and when I had finally settled on the bateda wada – spiced mashed potatoes battered and fried – and the mishkaki, spiced and grilled steak, I waited. I was a long way from work for lunch, so somewhat worried about time, but it seemed impossible to catch the waitress’ eye. She was busy with another table, then busy wandering around the restaurant, then just missing. Finally I ordered.

The potato balls, when they arrived, were dry but luckily there was an array of sauces on the table; ambli tamarind sauce, pili pili hot sauce and moto moto chili sauce, that got slathered on everything.

meat and potatoes

I read a magazine then got up to go to the bathroom. When I got back to my table, my steak was sitting there, getting cold. I was disappointed that she hadn’t bothered to put it under a heat lamp for a few minutes until I got back, but there was no telling her that – she was MIA for the rest of the meal, save for a surly water refill. When I wanted to pay, I had to get up and stand at the cash register. Luckily? It was the owner who came to help but when he inquired about the experience and I told him about the terrible service, he hauled the waitress over and reprimanded her in front of me. Her indignant, “what?!” shouted in the restaurant mirrored the shock and incredulity on mine.

Service aside, the flavours are interesting and complex. I like the combination of tamarind and fennel seed with chilies, especially in beef, but everything was so dry.  Simba’s has similar fare and is a much better experience, in my opinion.

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Jambo Grill & Good Morning Paan
3219 Kingsway, Vancouver

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Simba’s African Grill

Posted on October 5, 2010 by | 2 Comments

cassava
Vancouver World Tour > Africa > East Africa.

I’d heard decent things about Simba’s Grill over the years, but never enough to get it high enough on my list. I almost made it there during Meat-on-a-Stick week but then it slipped under the radar again until last week when I managed to convince my partner to go on a longish walk to the West End to eat some African food. “What’s it going to be like?” he asked. “Skewers, I think” was my response. And so we set out, not expecting much.

goat curry

Expectations were not raised when the owner came over and gruffly asked if we had any questions. I didn’t have any specific ones, other than I wanted some recommendations. The menu is divided into barbecue (on skewers, ha!) and curry. The curry (and the naan, and the chutneys) have a decidedly Indian influence that I need to learn more about, with familiar ingredients but unrecognizable names. We ended up with the goat curry in brown sauce (mbuzi muchuzi) and barbecued ostrich (mbuni).

ugali

Before they arrived though, we got a complementary plate of fried cassava sprinkled with chilies. The table already held a set of coconut chutney, yogurt and tamarind sauce and the cassava was accompanied by homemade pili-pili hot sauce and mango hot sauce, so there were plenty of flavours to be sampled. Several of them were unapologetically (and deliciously) spicy but we had a large Tusker beer from Kenya to quell the heat.

The mango hot sauce had an exquisite flavour, both sweet and spicy, that I started dabbing on the cassava with the coconut chutney but by the end of the meal I had poured out the rest of each on various parts of the meal. The pili-pili was more heat than flavour but gave the cassava and ugali (cornmeal made from maize) a good kick whereas the tamarind sauce was dark and sultry and sticky.

The ostrich came with saffron rice so fragrant that I held the plate to my face before I even tasted anything. Then I tasted the rice, even before the meat. Then I sliced open a chunk of ostrich and it was medium rare and a beautiful dark wine colour. It tasted rich and decadent, while still being quite lean meat. Astonishingly, it got even better with a little dab of the mango hot sauce.

From the first bite we started in with “Mmmm!” and “Try this!” and it didn’t stop until we were walking home, doggie-bag in hand. By the time we switched plates, half-way through the mean I had already uttered, “wow” several times – something that rarely happens anymore. The goat curry provoked more wows; I dunked spoonfuls of the soft ugali in the sauce and spooned up mouthfuls of flavour. It was different than an Indian curry, there was more heat and more going on in the background with cloves and cinnamon. There were also bones, some of them small and barely noticeable in the thick sauce, so be careful.

The decor is pure African kitsch, from lion’s mane wall sconces to saucières with embossed lions on them and plates that would not be out of place in the Fantasyland Hotel but who cares? The food is delicious, the portions are huge and the walk home along the water (at least for us) is incomparable. We’ll be back soon.

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Simba’s Grill
825 Denman Street, Vancouver

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Carthage Cafe

Posted on September 24, 2010 by | 5 Comments

carthago mussels
Around Vancouver in 52 Restaurants > Africa > Tunisia.

In amongst the East Van Ethiopian lurks a lone Tunisian restaurant – Carthage Cafe. The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion tells us that “North African dining resembles Ethiopian in that bread is the only utensil” but North Africa has been involved in Mediterranean trade since Carthage was a busy port and the cuisine has been borrowed from many cultures.

merguez, chicken, lamb and couscous

At lunch Matt honed in on the combo dish of house-made merguez sausage, lamb, and chicken with couscous and vegetables and I ordered the ‘Carthago’ mussels – Mediterranean mussels grown locally in Horseshoe Bay – spiced with cumin and harissa and served with delicious, hand-cut fries.

I had been to Carthage Cafe a while ago, back before they had a liquor license, so I wasn’t surprised to find some changes when I went back to check it out for Ethnic Eats. A trendy bistro feel – dark walls and Paris-themed art – made it feel like we were going to have to come again for an evening visit.

carthage cafe

And when the food came we amended the plan to include several more people, or perhaps a St. Bernard. The portions were huge! Fat mussels in their dark shells created an elaborately stacked structure dripping with chili oil and flanked by a plate of French fries and a finger bowl. On Matt’s end, there was a heaping platter of meat – a lamb leg, a chicken leg and a mess of sausages – on top of savoury, saucy couscous and some roasted vegetables. This was after we had incautiously filled up on soft French bread and butter.

We were so full we had crackers and cheese for dinner, but it was satisfying. Matt didn’t use a knife for his entire meal, all of it tender and the meat just falling off the bone while I languidly dipped fries in the gravy boat of homemade harissa long after I thought I couldn’t have another bite.

There are a couple of dishes I’d like to check out (not to mention the wine list) so I’ll be back soon, but in the meantime I am going to ponder the French bistro-Tunisian restaurant-African eatery continuum some more.

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Carthage Cafe
1851 Commercial Drive, Vancouver

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Fassil Ethiopian

Posted on September 16, 2010 by | 1 Comment

fassil
Around Vancouver in 52 Restaurants > Africa > Ethiopia.

We’ve been to Fassil Ethiopian before. Several times in fact. But it’s my favorite and it’s been a while and Matt hadn’t tried Ethiopian yet, so off we went on a lunch date.

I’ve never been for Ethiopian with only two people and I was almost apoplectic with what to order. Would it be the vegetarian combo with derek tibs (chunks of fried, spiced lamb) or the doro wat (chicken stew)? There just weren’t enough of us to get a full sampling and so we ordered the Fassil Combo with kitfo. One of my favorite dishes, kitfo is rare beef spiced with chili powder and tastes well enough on its own but takes on a whole new level of flavour when paired with the mild, white cheese that seems to me must be goat.

Ethiopian food is generally served up in stews, called wats, or sauteed in tibs on a “plate” of injera, the flat, spongy, sometimes slightly purple iron-filled bread that is the Ethiopian staple. It can be spicy in some cases, or mild. The Fassil combo comes with smaller portions of alicha (curried vegetable stew), keye wot (cubed stew beef), misr wot (lentils) and kik wot (split peas) so it’s a good cross-section of textures and flavours.

You eat Ethiopian food with your hands, so make sure they’re washed. Then, you rip off a piece of an injera roll, wrap some stew or meat up in it and put it in your mouth. When you’re out of the rolls on the plate, your host may bring you some more (customary at Fassil at least) or you can start ripping up the plate. It may have absorbed some of the oil from the stews, which makes it all the more tasty, if not a little messy. Traditionalists will try eating “gursha“, a technique where you feed your dining companion as a gesture of intimacy and respect.

I’ve eaten at most of Vancouver’s Ethiopian restaurants and while there are a couple more good ones (I would go back to both Harambe and Red Sea Cafe), I always end up back at Fassil. The hospitality and service are kind and the food it excellent.

I wrote this about Fassil’s injera the last time I reviewed it and it still holds true:

Their is soft and fresh and handmade on the premises. This is a process, we learned, that is fairly simple, but takes 3 days for the dough to rise properly and a seemingly large amount of pans, since the injera has to be cooled separately from each other to keep from sticking. Like everything else these days, the chef told us there is apparently “instant injera” available, but at Fassil it’s homemade and it did taste heavenly. Perfectly spongy and slightly sour, it’s much more than a conduit for the wats.

Just be warned, there is a lot of it. I was wishing hard for a couple of extra bodies after we were politely scolded for not finishing our lunch. Either that or a take-out container.

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Fassil Ethiopian
5 – 736 East Broadway, Vancouver

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Posted in African, Ethiopian, Vancouver52

African Breese Biltong

Posted on August 30, 2010 by | 3 Comments

biltong
Around Vancouver in 52 Restaurants > Africa > South Africa.

Vancouver has a pretty decent selection of East African restaurants (which I will certainly get to telling you about now that we’re touring though Africa), but Matt and I went on a road trip to Pemberton last weekend which just happened to take us past African Breese Imports in North Vancouver. African Breese, a South African import shop, specializes in all things South African including soap, BBQ sauce, candy and Rooiboos tea. Labels are often in English and Afrikaans and even with familiar brands like Cadbury chocolates, the products are utterly foreign. We walked around in awe at all the wonders but we were here for the meat.
Biltong

Biltong is a cured meat, a softer kind of jerky, made with beef and pork and sometimes ostrich and other meat (my Oxford Companion to Food suggests zebra). It’s spiced with coriander seeds, cut into strips and dried for days, at which point it becomes preserved and perfect for storing.  Unlike jerky, however, the meat is still relatively soft and the fat hasn’t been removed, which makes it much more palatable in my opinion. The biltong at African Breese has been on my list since it appeared on Vancouver Magazine’s List of things to taste before you die, but I didn’t realize there were so many kinds! Traditional, hunter and spicy blends filled the display case, along with some ”chili bites” and droëwors sausage, also in several flavours. Chili bites looked to be smaller, dryer slices of meat than the biltong, whereas droëwors are long, slender pieces of meat, similar to a peperoni stick or dry sausage. We didn’t try the chili bites but we got one each of karoo, traditional and spicy droëwors and a bag each of hunter and spicy biltong.

I thought I would like the spicy biltong best, but the hunter is complex and sophisticated and I couldn’t stop eating it (although that may have just been the salt). Coriander seed, fennel and sugar play against each other to be sweet-savoury-salty and we were sold. The salt and black pepper flavours linger on the palate. Matt describes it as being “very ‘meaty’ – more so than most jerky – without being offensive or overwhelming”. The spicy variety is similar in flavour to the hunter, but with a nice initial bite of heat sits somewhat separate from the rest of the flavours.

The droëwors were gone too fast to take specific tasting notes, but they were similar in flavour to the biltong while being an even more interesting texture. They are made from thin boerwors (farmers’) sausage but I could have sworn that they were hand-rolled. Lumpy sticks of beef and pork meat wrapped in a dry casing with pockets of both air and fat, each bite was different. And delicious. The karoo was my favorite and differed subtly in spices from the traditional. They are the perfect meat for a journey and although they were designed for quite a different sort of journey, they were no less enjoyed on the Sea to Sky.

Bitter Lemon

All that dried meat called for some liquid, so we had also got some water, ginger beer and this delightful bitter lemon soda (with quinine!) to wash it down. I am in love with this drink and will probably be drinking it for the rest of summer, hopefully with a stick of karoo in the other hand.

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African Breese Imports
1054 Marine Drive, North Vancouver

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Around Vancouver in 52 Restaurants

Posted on January 10, 2010 by | 20 Comments

Photo Credit: ecstaticist.

So I’ve dedicded to start a new project for dining in 2010. The tagline of this site is “Sampling the World’s Cuisine Without Leaving Vancouver” and so instead of of traipsing around Vancouver’s culinary delights in the random way I have been for the last (almost) 2 years, I am going to present my finds country by country.

I still have a bit of a backlog of reviews, so I may post those interspersed with the project and if I feel really keen, I may even post some recipes.

First stop on the grand tour: North America. Got any favorites you’d like to recommend?

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Posted in African, Asian, Australian, Belgian, Cambodian, Caribbean, Chinese, Cuban, Dutch, Eastern European, El Salvadoran, Ethiopian, Filipino, French, German, Greek, Himalayan, Indian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lebanese, Malaysian, Mexican, Nepalese, News, Persian, Romanian, Scandinavian, Singaporean, Spanish, Srilankan, Taiwanese, Thai, Tunisian, Vancouver52, Vietnamese

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Gojo Little Africa Cafe

Posted on December 11, 2008 by | 2 Comments

honey-wine

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Raul the other night to check out the new Ethiopian place on the Drive, Gojo Little Africa Cafe.

We ordered the doro alicha ($12.50) because the doro wat is only available on weekends, but the chicken and veggies in butter sauce flavoured with ginger, rosemary and jalapeno in the alicha were exquisite.
doro-alicha

We also ordered the vegetarian combo ($11.95) which comes with cabbage, yatikilt wat (green beans, carrots, bell peppers and onions sauteed in garlic and tomoatos), spinach and miser wat (spicy red lentils) laid out on injera.

veg-combo

Everything was tasty. I would have preferred a but more spices in the doro alicha, but the inerja was perfectly soft and the journey from starving to very full of delicious bites of stew was pleasing in the extreme.

I also had honey wine (mead) to drink which was something new for me, and which I enjoyed thoroughly. Cloudy greeny-gold and somewhat foamy, it didn’t really look like wine (and technically it isn’t: no grapes), but it did taste like something resembling a sweet wine cooler and was the perfect accompaniment to washing down bits of inerja bread.

Gojo is such a cute little place. There is a traditional Ethiopian sitting area with rough-hewn wooden chairs and a thatched faux roof over the bar. The rest of decor is simple but appropriate; framed photographs of Ethiopia and t-shirts under glass for tablecloths. I liked it. It felt cosy and comfortable and the service was likewise warm and casual.

It was empty the whole time we were there (late-ish on a Thursday night) which I hope is not indicative of its popularity.

Gojo Little Africa on Urbanspoon
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Gojo Little Africa Cafe
2838 Commercial Drive (@12th Ave), Vancouver

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Fabulous Fassil

Posted on May 27, 2008 by | 2 Comments

fassil

Ethiopian food is one of the funnest cuisines to eat with a friend, so it makes me exceedingly happy that there are so many excellent Ethiopian restaurants close to my house. And when Travis suggested I try Fassil Ethiopian Restaurant (one I hadn’t even heard of), I knew we would be dining there soon.

fassil

At the suggestion of the chef/proprietor we had the mixed veggie combo and the #14 lamb stew, medium spicy. As with all Ethiopian cuisine, it comes on a large piece of injera bread, with the stews or wats placed on top. In the top photo you can see the various vegetarian dishes; spinach boiled with spices, marinated vegetables in spices, fresh salad. red lentil stew, and corn. The lamb was brought out in a separate bowl, to be spooned out into the centre and more injera accompanied the dish on the side, to be used in scooping up the stews.

Everything was supremely tasty. The lamb was tender and expertly spiced and the vegetable “dishes” complemented by either offsetting the heat of the meat with spices or with actual temperature (in the case of the cold, fresh salad). The bread used to wrap and eat the stews is the best part, though. Their injera is soft and fresh and handmade on the premises. This is a process, we learned, that is fairly simple, but takes 3 days for the dough to rise properly and a seemingly large amount of pans, since the injera has to be cooled separately from each other to keep from sticking. Like everything else these days, the chef told us there is apparently “instant injera” available, but at Fassil it’s homemade and it did taste heavenly. Perfectly spongy and slightly sour, it’s much more than a conduit for the wats.

“Fabulous” in the traditional sense, is probably not the best word to describe Fassil, a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant close to Fraser and Broadway. But if you mean (as I do) fabulous in the sense that you can walk in and feel right at home, where you are welcomed and appreciated and where everything is clean if not fancy, then it is the perfect adjective.

We were drinking beer with dinner but after making our food, the owner and his wife sat down with a friend and had traditional Ethiopian coffee. It was hard to ignore the elaborate pouring going on behind us, with ceremonial cups and incense and when I asked about it, we were immediately offered a cup with a smile. Little gestures like that are so meaningful in a dining out world filling up fast with insolent twenty-something hostesses that it made me want to hug them. Instead, I will simply make a point of returning. I still want to check out the Addis Cafe and the Red Sea Cafe for comparison, but it will be hard not to head immediately back to Fassil…like tonight.

Fassil Ethiopian on Urbanspoon
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Fassil Ethiopian Restaurant
5-736 East Broadway

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Tiny Chairs and Huge Plates at Harambe

Posted on February 25, 2008 by | 4 Comments

harambe_6.jpg

Photos courtesy of Harambe. 

Even more amazing than the side-by-side Starbucks on Robson Street is the fact that two Ethiopian restaurants are operating within a block of each other on Commercial Drive. At least I think it’s amazing. I had no idea there was such a demand for Ethiopian food. And good thing too, because my good friend and new roommate had planned to meet up at the Addis Cafe (the one we had both been to before), but when we got there and it was closed we still had a spare and headed down to Harambe just a little bit farther down.

Entering the brightly painted room with arches and windows cut into walls, we were ushered to a section of low tables and chairs by a waitress whose smile exuded warmth and welcome. The section we were in seems to be the traditional Ethiopian area, with heavy furniture intricately carved out of a dark wood and covered in gorgeous tapestries. Hand drums were piled in the corner behind us, waiting for someone who knew how to play them. I would highly recommend sitting there (as opposed to the regular sized, “boring” tables), unless you are a giant in which case it might not be that comfortable.

harambe2.jpg

The service was very slow – rather surprising since there were not that many tables – but the pace served more to transport us to another place than to irritate. Besides, by the time the food arrived we definitely appreciated it.

Ethiopian food is served (as above) on a large plate of Injera bread with various saucy stews (called wats) dabbed on top. The bread is an iron-rich staple of Ethiopia and Eritrea and the wats range from popular doro wat (chicken breast in a Berberie spicy sauce) to yebeg tibs (lamb stew in jalapeno and rosemary sauce with spiced butter). There are also a number of vegetarian options, thanks to the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian church specifying up to 200 fasting days per year. We ordered the Chef’s combo platter for 2 ($12 per person) which was a very filling dish consisting of doro wat, yebeg wat (lamb in spicy Berberie sauce and served with Ethiopian cottage cheese), and assorted vegetarian lentil and spinach stews.

To eat it you rip off a piece of bread and wrap the stew in it; there are no utensils. Harambe‘s website offers this step-by-step guide to eating Ethiopian:

Traditional Way of Eating Injera:
step 1 Tear a piece of Injera off the side of the large piece laying on your plate.
step 2 Hold the piece of Injera that you tore flat in your hand.
step 3 Put the piece of Injera over your choice of wat (sauce).
step 4 Grab and hold some wat (sauce) with the injera.
step 5 Enjoy the whole scoop or ‘gursha’ (putting food in someone else’s mouth)

We didn’t try ‘gursha’, but we did order some Ethiopian chai tea (shai) which, we learned quickly, is not like regular chai at all. For starters, the water is spiced first and then an herbal tea bag (with very little flavour) is added to it. When the lovely waitress brought it to us on the tray, we were looked at the weedy tea and spicy water and said, “we ordered chai” and she said, “this is chai.” Seeing that we were obviously at some kind of impasse, she added helpfully, “it’s Ethiopian chai.” And so it was. It was interesting, but probably the coffee would have been a better choice, as it occurred to me later that I love Ethiopian Harrar coffee.

I’m so glad that Addis Cafe was closed or we probably would have never ventured down to check out Harambe. Now, of course I want to go back to Harambe, but I also want to try Addis again so I can see what’s unique about each one.

Harambe on Urbanspoon

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Harambe
2149 Commercial Drive, Vancouver

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