by Jesse Riggle, Amateur Guest blogger from New York, NY
(Photo on left is one of Jesse's work. His paintings appear in galleries from LA to NYC. Check out his work)
Hello there, my name is Jesse (not to be confused with your regular host). Jessica asked me to guest blog, so here are the words I have written.
I recently learned a valuable food-lesson, a lesson specifically of a food to avoid. The food in question: Okra. Now, before I get to far along I'd like to clear one thing up, I don't actually have anything against okra. In fact I have had okra that I quite liked. Pickled okra, okra at Indian restaurants, delicious. But, I still may never order it again. Let me tell you why (and some other stuff too).
First a brief back-story. A couple of my friends started a Brooklyn/Queens-centric eating club about a year ago. We ate at a great many restaurants with an abundance of good and interesting food. Nothing any of us would call a lemon ever cropped up, not a bad record for a year of new restaurants. Well, a week back (which happened to be nearly the 1 year anniversary) we went to a new place that was also across the street from the first place we ever went to, fortuitous? Fateful? Frightening? eh... The restaurant is called Buka and deals in Nigerian food.
The restaurant itself is perfectly nice. Roomy, a swell wait staff, a comfortable davenport, what more could you want in your first 5 minutes? They also presented us with a very intriguing cocktail list. I myself did not partake, as I have old-man tastes in alcohol (whisky, beer, and gin, please), but everyone else at the table thoroughly enjoyed their fare. A promising start, spirits were high.
Next up came the appetizers. I ordered some- thing. I don't really remember what it was but it had honey and cake in the name. What they gave me had no honey and was not very cake like either. In fact, upon my first bite I thought to myself and verbally stated, "This tastes like the zoo." Now, I have never eaten a zoo, but I imagine if you could eat a zoo it would taste like my appetizer. That might sound like an unpleasant flavour, but really, when the strangeness of it passed I quite enjoyed it. I like zoo's, they make me happy, and as it so happens, I would probably like to eat one. The rest of the appetizers on the table were also generally delicious. So far so good.
Then the main course... The moment when things started to get iffy. There was an equal split of people ordering whole fish or some variety of meat in a stew/sauce type setup plus fufu. Fufu is a starch, their answer to bread, it is pounded yam or cassava, formed into a ball. Myself, I ordered the goat with the fermented cassava fufu. I also ordered the okra sauce (remember when I mentioned I probably won't order okra again?). Well, in my excitement for the big bowl of food infront of me, I grabbed my fork, gave it a quick stir, and lifted said fork. A nice string of melted good came up with my fork, and I said, "Hey, there is cheese in this!" I love cheese, it might be my favorite. Then I thought about what I had said and it dawned on me there was probably no actual cheese in my bowl. Upon further inspection I discovered the whole thing was a big ol' bowl of slime. We're talking Ghostbusters slimer-slime here. Serious slime. I stared at it in disbelief, vaguely remembering an episode of Top Chef where Mr. Colicchio mentions his distaste for okra, for it being slimy.
I went full on squint-eyed suspicious staring at my food. I decided to go for it though. I got a big ol' scoop of okra on my fork and moved it toward my mouth. A long un-broken strand of slime still connected my fork to the bowl as I shoved it in my mouth. It was a mistake. My mouth and brain could not wrap themselves around this... stuff. I might have tried to spit it out but I think it was afixed to my tongue by this point. I did not give up though, I tried eat my food. I ate as much goat as I could, it still had the skin on it near as I could figure, and there was a bone in my bowl I could not identify. It looked like a check mark. I went so far as to look up anatomical drawings of goat skeletons trying to find this bone, I could not. A mystery. The saving grace to this whole debacle was the fufu. I was able to dunk the fufu in the slime and eat some of it. The flavours were all fine, but the solids and I guess liquids (of the non-Newtonian variety), were not in my palatablity-range. I was not alone in this, most people around the table agreed, that maybe the food was a little to authentic for our American mouths to handle.
After we finished, we all walked down the street to a soul-food restaurant for dessert. Good times. Seriously, good times, I enjoyed the whole night. The restaurant was a totally new food experience for me, and I am glad I went. If for nothing more than my appetizer that tasted like the zoo and my new found knowledge to never ever order okra again. Would I recommend the place? Sure why not, just stay away from the okra, and probably the goat too (and if you hate the food, there is soul food down the street).
The end!
*As a side not, I looked up Nigerian cuisine on the internet, and learned of a food they quite enjoy, that being draw soup. According to wikipedia: "typically [made] from okra or melon seeds. It gets its name from the thick nature of the broth; it draws out of the bowl when eaten". So it would seem this is what I had.
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