The guys at Yemen Café in Brooklyn don’t mess around: before we even had a chance to think about what we wanted to order, an efficient, non-communicative waiter slammed two bowls of soup, a few pieces of lemon, something resembling a fresh tomato salsa, a pair of salads topped with more of the salsa,  and a gigantic piece of hot, fluffy, round flatbread—roughly the size of a medium pizza—on our table. No conversation, no questions. Suddenly, there was food. Tons of it. And we hadn’t even ordered yet. I liked this Yemen Café place.

After slurping down our soup (a dark, salty brew that tasted like meat stock with onion and a hint of cardamom) and salad, we decided to order haneez (roasted lamb, $19) and roasted chicken with salta ($15), generally considered Yemen’s national dish. As we waited for our meals, I started to suspect that we’d ordered well: I (unfortunately) don’t understand a lick of Arabic, but the server seemed to yell the words “salta” and “haneez” nearly every time he shouted an order back to the kitchen. Apparently, most of Yemen Café’s other patrons—the majority of whom appeared to be Yemeni—had selected the same dishes we did.

The haneez was a work of art: a ridiculously juicy roasted rack of lamb, served with a mountain of basmati rice and topped with a small scoop of stewed potatoes and carrots. I’d argue that the lamb was nearly as good as any I’ve ever eaten, but the salta was even more impressive: a sizzling metal bucket of whole okra, tomato, potato, and carrots, cooked in a frothy stew of anise, ginger, onion, cardamom, and whipped fenugreek. The salta was accompanied by a juicy chunk of roasted chicken (breast, thigh, drumstick, wing, and neck) with a beautiful smoky taste, along with yet another epic mound of basmati rice.

Which brings me to a random question: why don’t more people eat chicken necks? There’s nothing wrong with chicken necks. They taste like… well, chicken. I’ll admit that it’s a little bit harder to get at chicken neck meat than, say, chicken breast meat (though I still don’t understand the whole chicken breast thing… chickens have breasts? Male chickens, too?), but it’s not that hard. Where does all the neck meat go? When you get a “whole” rotisserie chicken at the grocery store, there’s no neck. Why not? Is it thrown out, or ground up into animal feed? I can understand leaving the head out—really, who wants to have dinner looking up at you?—but why leave out the neck? I don’t get it. Chicken necks are not scary.

Anyway, that roasted chicken was damned good, and large enough to stuff all but the most gluttonous diner. And once we’d eaten our way through about ¾ of our flatbread… boom! Another large, hot round loaf appeared on our table, without even a word from the waiter. The guy was amazing—not remotely rude or unfriendly, just efficient and generous with the bread. Yemen Café might not be the warmest, fuzziest dining experience in Brooklyn… but as long as the food keeps coming, I can live with that.

Yemen Cafe
176 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn
Subway: Borough Hall (2, 3, 4, 5 trains)

On a ferry from Trinidad to Venezuela a few years ago, I met a twentysomething Venezuelan soccer coach who had just returned from a yearlong stint in Cuba.  As soon as we started talking about Cuba, I (of course) mentioned how much I love Cuban food, especially ropa vieja (“old clothes”, beef simmered with onions, peppers, tomatoes, and garlic until the beef turns into a soft, stringy-looking pile of delicious mush).

Unfortunately, my new Venezuelan friend just laughed at me, but not because there was beef juice dripping down my chin.  He said that nobody actually eats ropa vieja anymore in Cuba.  Apparently, it’s illegal to slaughter or eat a cow in Cuba without government permission, and most Cubans barely ever see a cut of beef anymore.

I’m not kidding:  unapproved beef “trafficking” is considered a serious crime in Cuba.  If you slaughter a cow in Cuba, you can expect to spend 4 to 10 years in prison—even if you’re the farmer who raised the cow.  (The penalty for killing a human is barely more severe:  7 to 15 years, depending on the circumstances.)  You’ll face a two-year sentence just for eating a piece of illicitly slaughtered beef.  Cuban police have been known to raid homes when they smell roasting meat… and I wish that I was just kidding about that.

So why are beef-related crimes such a big deal in Cuba?  Thanks to inefficient management of agricultural resources, Cuba’s once-legendary cattle stock has dwindled from more than 6 million cows in the 1950s to fewer than 2 million today.  The government obsessively controls the relatively small amount of meat that is still produced by the island nation:  the vast majority of the nation’s beef (and much of its chicken and other meat) is reserved for visitors to the island’s upscale tourist resorts, which means that very little meat is allocated to Cuban citizens.  And if a Cuban craves a quarter pounder and decides to break the law by taking a bite out of Bessie… bam, 10 years in the clink.

So as I attacked a plate of ropa vieja (the aforementioned beef dish, simmered with onions, peppers, tomatoes, and garlic until the beef disintegrates into a soft, stringy-looking mess) at Elmhurst’s Rincon Criollo, it was hard for me not to think about the fact that ropa vieja (arguably one of Cuba’s national dishes, along with arroz con pollo) is no longer on the menu for most Cubans.  It was also hard for me not to think about the story of Rincon Criollo’s owners:  the five Acosta brothers were orphaned when their parents died in 1942, and they managed to survive by selling fruit on the streets of Santiago.  By 1949, the five young orphans had somehow saved enough to purchase a small restaurant.  They were wildly successful, and spent the next decade building their business into a legendary restaurant—their first Rincon Criollo—that seated more than 2000 guests.  Unfortunately, it all came crashing down when the government seized their business following the communist revolution in 1962.

In a classic rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-(relative)-riches tale (click here for the full story), the brothers eventually made their way to Queens, and opened their current version of Rincon Criollo on Junction Boulevard in 1976.  The brothers have been in the same location in Corona for 35 years, and they still use many of the same recipes that made them famous in Cuba in the 1950s.

Unsurprisingly, the food at Rincon Criollo is amazing:  we feasted on thinly-pounded chicken grilled with onions, garlicky Cuban-style black beans, fried green plantains, an avocado salad and the best ropa vieja with moros y cristianos (rice cooked with beans) I’d ever eaten.  All of our dishes fell into the category of well-executed basics… but all were amazing.  We loitered for three hours over lunch, trying unsuccessfully to polish off the last bits of our meals, unhurried by the friendly Cuban servers.

Rincon Criollo’s ropa vieja probably wasn’t quite amazing enough to risk spending ten years in a Cuban prison, but it was damned good, and made me feel lucky to live in a place where I can buy some tasty beef (or chicken or pork or Cuban coffee) from my new Cuban friends whenever I want to.  You might see veins pop out of my neck whenever you get me talking about the state of the U.S. economy and government… but then again, things could always be much, much worse, right?

Rincon Criollo
40-09 Junction Blvd., Queens
Subway: Junction Blvd. (7 train)

Conclusive proof that I’m a dork:  I stayed up until about 2:00 a.m. a few nights ago, trying to figure out whether Massawa, a popular “Ethiopian” restaurant near Columbia University, is owned by Ethiopians or Eritreans.  I’d been told by several Ethiopians and Eritreans (most notably by the owners of Dahlak, a desperately underrated Eritrean restaurant in DC) that the cuisines of the two nations are essentially indistinguishable, other than the languages used:  Ethiopians generally speak Amharic, Eritreans speak Tigrinya.  So I tried to learn enough Tigrinya and Amharic to read between the lines of Massawa’s menu.

Here’s what I learned:  I really should get a television so I can waste time more efficiently.  I also learned that Massawa’s food terms are mostly in Tigrinya.  So that makes me think that Massawa is owned by Eritreans.  (I could have just asked somebody at Massawa, but that would have… um, made sense and saved time.)  It sounds like we might have another NYC food closet case: since few Americans have ever heard of Eritrea, Massawa (understandably) encourages people to think of their restaurant as “Ethiopian”.

Both Eritrean and Ethiopian cuisine is based largely on injera, a spongy, slightly fermented flatbread made from teff, a millet-like grain that is virtually unknown outside of northeastern Africa.  A typical meal consists of a large shared platter of injera topped with a variety of meat and vegetable stews; diners use pieces of injera to scoop up the stews.  (Nope, no forks here.)  We went to Massawa for lunch, and ordered spicy beef tebsi (beef cooked with tomatoes and hot peppers; $8.85 as a lunch special) and a vegetable combo (two lentil dishes, a potato/carrot dish, and collards, $9.50), hoping to sample a decent variety of Massawa’s offerings.

I desperately want to love Massawa.  Really.  It’s a clean, bright, likable little place, with friendly staff and a cozy, pillow-filled seating area downstairs for large parties.  They serve Ethiopian beers (Addis and Harar).  And I love Ethiopian/Eritrean food—the aforementioned Dahlak is one of my favorite restaurants in DC, and I wouldn’t mind finding a similarly lovable Eritrean/Ethiopian spot in NYC.

So it pains me to say this… but I really didn’t love the food at Massawa.  Everything was bland and pedestrian, unlike any other Ethiopian/Eritrean meal I’ve ever eaten anywhere in the United States.  The shiro (pureed lentils) was reasonably tasty, but both the collards and alitcha (potatoes with carrots) were punchless, and the (non-pureed) lentils were simultaneously sweet and bland (vaguely reminiscent of Spaghetti-Os, but less starchy).  Even the beef tebsi, the national dish of Eritrea, lacked flavor, despite the fact that we’d requested extra spice.  None of the food was bad, but it wasn’t remotely inspiring, either.

But at least the Harar beer was cold and tasty, the prices were reasonable, and the server was lovely.  Before we left, I asked her whether the owners were from Ethiopia or Eritrea.  She smiled, and just said “the cuisines of the two countries are very similar.”  I’ll trust my pathetic Tigrinya skills and call our meal Eritrean… but only because it gives me an excuse to look elsewhere in NYC for a go-to Ethiopian spot.

Massawa
1239 Amsterdam Avenue, Manhattan
Subway: 116-Columbia University (1 train)

One of the unintended consequences of my little food project is that I’ve spent a lot of time face-to-face (or face-to-hoof, or face-to-pork-rind) with my food hang-ups. Every once in a while, I’m reminded of how the food culture works in Iowa, where I grew up. We were raised to believe that there are exactly three acceptable main dishes: chicken, pork, and beef. Sometimes there’s fish, which is considered a poor substitute for real meat. Everything else is considered weird and inedible, including goat, lamb, kangaroo, and the internal organs of chickens, pigs, or cows.

I’m allegedly a well-traveled guy with a reasonably adventurous palate, but sometimes I realize that I have irrational, Midwestern-esque mental blocks about certain foods. I honestly love gelatinous Korean fish skins and slimy okra, but it’s hard for me to be truly open-minded about offal, hooves, and other “non-Midwestern” meat products, despite my best efforts. Did I give the Bajan cow hooves a completely fair shot? Probably not—I nibbled at them, nodding bravely, and trying hard not to think about what I was eating. I love good chicharron now, but that took a few tries. I wasn’t completely open-minded about the kangaroo salad, either—though I ultimately thought the kangaroo meat was tastier than the lame vegetables that accompanied it.

And goat? I thought it was a skinky, gamey beast when I first tried it. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that the stinky gamey taste was partly in my head; I just wasn’t psychologically ready to embrace goat until I’d eaten it a few times.

After the Nigerian meal I ate at Buka in Brooklyn, I realized that I’ve finally crossed a threshold: goat and I are totally cool now. I spent my meal lamenting that the tomato stew and okra sauce surrounding the goat lacked the interesting spice of the other dishes; I didn’t acknowledge that I was eating “non-Midwestern” meat until I got home and sat in front of the computer.

Buka, for what it’s worth, might be one of the most appealing international restaurants I’ve visited in NYC, with high ceilings and huge swaths of exposed brick. The staff is warm and casual, and there’s a full bar, so you can get your drink on. I was feeling tropical on a warm NYC afternoon, and ordered one of Buka’s specialty cocktails (“Go Slow”, $7), consisting of rum and guava juice. It didn’t occur to me that guava juice is pink. I felt un-manly. Judge if you must.

To accompany my girly drink (my dining companion, who actually is a girl, ordered a Guinness, and laughed at me for drinking pink stuff) we ordered a non-girly appetizer called moi moi ($5). The description on the menu was tantalizingly cryptic: “ground steamed honey bean cake.” We were served an unappetizing-looking spongy thing that looked like it came straight from a fifth-grader’s failed experiment with a jello mold. But damn, it was delicious: a spicy bean pudding, filled with unexpected flecks of fish, olive, and boiled egg. My texture-sensitive companion was (understandably) turned off by the “mouthfeel” of the stuff, but I loved it.

For her entrée, my wise companion ordered asaro ($10 for the standard version, a few bucks more if you want a meat topping), a fiery glob of sautéed yams, with flecks of onion, cumin, and ginger, among other seasonings. It was a simple dish, often served as the starchy base for a meat topping, but the spices were rich and delicious. I was jealous of my companion for ordering it, and kept picking at her plate whenever she looked away.

To my surprise, the somewhat exotic-sounding goat stewed in tomato with okra sauce and fufu was a dud. The goat part of it was perfectly fine: it was phenomenally tender (at least by goat standards), and wasn’t even the slightest bit gamey. But both the tomato sauce and okra were startlingly bland compared with the moi moi and asaro; the tomato and okra tasted fresh, but they were lamentably uninteresting.

After our meal, I accidentally ran across Robert Sietsema’s 2010 review of Buka in the Village Voice. I realized that we did a pretty crappy job of ordering: instead of getting the rather pedestrian goat-tomato stew, I shoulda asked for the isiewu (goat head stew, no longer on Buka’s printed menu), which apparently includes identifiable goat facial features. Sietsema’s pals pulled out bits of forehead and lips, but Sietsema himself (who, incidentally, is easily my favorite food writer anywhere) “won the prize when [he] pulled an eyeball out of the sand-colored goo.”

I’m jealous. Now that I’ve graduated from goat flesh, I think I’m ready for goat eyeballs.

Or not.

Buka
946 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
Subway: Clinton-Washington Aves. (A, C train)

Usually, my gluttony is exactly why I enjoy spending so much time in restaurants, but sometimes, the gluttony bites me in the (proverbial, but rapidly spreading) ass.  I got home from the Indonesian food bazaar—where friendly ladies continued to stuff food into my hands after I’d already eaten the equivalent of two full meals—at around 5:00 in the afternoon.  Two hours later, I met a friend at Kafana in the East Village for Serbian food.  I wasn’t ready for another heavy meal.  Not even close.  This threatened to be an unpleasant evening for my digestive tract and anything in its path.

Oh, well.  We ordered an appetizer anyway:  gibanica ($5.95), a cheese pie with layers of cow’s milk feta (not as sharp as the goat variety) and soft phyllo dough, similar to a Turkish bourek.  It was great.  It was large.  I struggled to eat my half of the gibanica, since I was still so staggeringly stuffed with Indonesian food.  I drank a few glasses of Montenegran white wine ($7), hoping that it would somehow help me to get through the meal without letting my head hit the table.

Luckily, my dining companion—a lively, brilliant Armenian colleague with plenty of great stories to tell—was in no particular hurry either, and we spent a good two hours picking through our entrée, Kafana’s monstrous mixed grill for two ($31.95, and worth every cent).  The dish included a perfectly rare porkchop (krmenadla), several pieces of cevapi (legendary Serbian sausage made from minced pork, beef, and veal, arguably the national dish of Serbia), several grilled prunes stuffed with walnuts and cheese and wrapped in bacon, a large piece of seljacka kobasic (“peasant sausage”—larger, coarser, and drier than the cevapi), and some flat, salty, tender pieces of smoked pork loin (dimljena vesalica).

All of it was outstanding, though I particularly loved the smoked pork loin, which was salty and tender enough to put a grin on my face. (And if you need somebody to put a grin on your face, ask a non-Serb to read the Serbian food terms in the previous sentence out loud—probably pretty hilarious).  The mixed grill even came with a small mound of lettuce, so that we could pretend to eat something healthy.

We chased our meat and lettuce with a delicious plate of sour cherry pie (pita sa visnjama, $5.95) recommended by our server (who was somewhat terse, but also intelligent, efficient, and absolutely gorgeous—my pal had a massive crush on her, especially after four glasses of Montenegran wine).  I mildly protested the idea of eating dessert, but once it was in front of me… well, what self-proclaimed glutton could possibly refuse a tasty piece of Serbian sour cherry pie, wrapped in phyllo dough and dusted with powdered sugar?

As our meal was winding down, we learned some great stuff from the friendly young Serbs at the next table.  It turns out that cevapi (also known as cevapcici in other parts of the Balkans) is a thoroughly non-standardized dish:  each family in Serbia has its own secret recipe, and cevapi served in one store, restaurant, or home might bear very little resemblance to a neighbor’s version.  The cevapi-maker’s choice of spices and animal parts (pork, beef, and veal are all fair game) can vary enormously, depending on the chef.  (Our Serbian friends had nothing but praise for Kafana’s cevapi, and also recommended Sarajevo Fast Foods in Astoria, which is owned by a family that was famous in Bosnia for their cevapi recipe.)

Even more interesting:  collard greens are apparently a huge part of the cuisine in parts of Serbia and Montenegro.  I usually think of collards as a purely tropical dish, perfected in Africa, Indonesia, and the American South.  Nope.  Collards are native to the Mediterranean and Balkans, and were apparently introduced to Africa (and eventually to the United States) by European colonists and traders.  Serbian collards?  Who knew?

Sadly, Kafana doesn’t offer too much in the way of collards, but there’s no shame in settling for cevapi, smoked pork loin, sour cherry pie, and—if you’re a single Armenian man sloshing with Montenegran wine—a little side dish of Serbian eye candy.

Kafana
116 Avenue C., Manhattan
Subway: 1st Ave. (L train) or 2nd Ave. (F train) or Astor Place (6 train)