Thus far, I’ve made some effort to maintain balance in the United Nations of Food quest.  Over the past month or two, I’ve had meals from Oceania, North America, South America, the Caribbean, Asia, and a decent cross-section of Western and Eastern Europe.

the food tasted good, but my innards are still haunted by memories of my last West African meal

But I’ve pretty much ignored Africa.  My last African food experience was Maima’s Liberian Bistro, more than 20 restaurants ago.

So I’ve been pretty damned lame with the African food, even though I know that I ultimately will eat about 53 African meals.  The tricky thing is that there really aren’t all that many African restaurants in NYC that claim to serve the cuisine of any particular nation—most African restaurants call themselves “African,” with no further elaboration.  Frankly, I’ve been a little bit intimidated:  I’m trying to find food from all 53 nations in Africa, but I only have leads for about 15 of those nationalities.  I guess that I’ve been waiting to eat African food until a magical African food tour guide magically appears in my life.

The other part of my African avoidance is purely physical:  I really enjoyed the Liberian cuisine in Queens a couple of months ago, but my bowels ached for a couple of days.  I’ve been irrationally reluctant to go back to a West African restaurant, knowing that my stomach might face a similar fate.

not too pretty... but is okra ever pretty?

And I was partly correct.  I definitely had a few minutes of intestinal burning after our trip to Abidjan, a Cote d’Ivorian spot in Bushwick.  But the burning sensation was relatively mild—and more importantly, it was absolutely worth it.

Abidjan is an informal place with a cryptic, one-page laminated menu, consisting of about a dozen grainy pictures with ridiculously brief descriptions:  “chicken tomato,” for example,  didn’t really tell us all that much.  We asked the server for recommendations, and ended up getting “okra,” “fish sauce,” and “peanut sauce” ($8 each) as our three entrees, accompanied by a side of attieke ($3) and some ginger juice ($2).  We had no idea what we had just ordered, but we eventually figured out that we’d ordered three entrees for two people.  Oh boy!

not too pretty... but is "peanut sauce" ever pretty?

Good thing that the entrees were healthy, low-calorie dishes.   The “peanut sauce” was Cote d’Ivoire’s rendition of groundnut stew, which is a staple in much of West Africa.  Everybody knows that peanuts are low in fat and calories, especially when large quantities of the peanuts have been pureed and stewed with onions, spices, tomatoes, and bits of pleasantly fatty beef.   My buddy Ryan, who is fortunately able to eat more than one meal in a sitting, was hopelessly addicted to the stuff.

I know that this sounds a little bit weird, but I got much more excited about the okra.  I might scare you away with a picture of an oily, slimy bowl of smashed okra, lightly seasoned with onion, a not-too-overpowering suite of West African spices, and an occasional bit of cow.  Sounds like hell, right?  But if you appreciate okra, this particular dish was a dream.  Unlike at Maima’s Liberian Bistro, the oil didn’t overpower the okra at Abidjan; the dish was dominated by slime, not grease.  Squirm all you want, but I absolutely loved it.

my new favorite food

As much as we enjoyed the “peanut sauce” and the okra, we got even more excited about attieke, our humble side dish, made from shaved cassava.  Most meals served on this planet contain a huge helping of starchy stuff—rice, pasta, plantains, grits, injera, fufu, or whatever.  I’m a huge carb lover and I mean this in the best possible way, but the aforementioned starchy staples are always dense, and usually somewhat thick and gooey.

Attieke?  Not gooey or dense at all.  It’s almost as if somebody took a hybrid of couscous and roasted quinoa, and then puffed it up with a little bit of air.  I absolutely loved the stuff, and could easily eat it every damned day without getting sick of it.

My only issue with our meal was the demon pepper that I foolishly attacked.  The “fish sauce” (bony whitefish served in a yellowish stew—tasty, but overshadowed by everything else we ordered) was accompanied by a colorful little pepper,

Fine. You win, you little sh*t.

probably a semi-ripe habanero.  It looked friendly and cute and small, but the little bastard kicked like a mule and bit like a crocodile once it was in my stomach.  It went perfectly with the “fish sauce,” but it continued to poke at my innards for about twelve hours.  (You really wanted to know that, right?  You’re welcome!)

I’m officially 1/7 of the way through the United Nations of Food quest, and this was only the third time that my stomach got cranky… and it was easily the mildest of the three cases.  More importantly, the burning sensations were absolutely worth it.  The pepper might not have been too kind, but the attieke and okra were among the best non-Russian treats I’ve eaten this side of The Islands (Jamaican) and Café Katja (Austrian).  Abidjan might not get any style points at all, but the place will always have a place in my heart for introducing me to my new favorite carb.

Restaurant Abidjan
1136 Broadway, Brooklyn
Subway: Kosciusko Street (J train)

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I live in Midtown, land of breathtakingly mediocre by-the-pound buffets.  I always knew that I’d someday find myself loading up a little plastic container at a lameass NYC hot bar, but I really didn’t think I’d enjoy it.  Sometimes, you just gotta inhale your crappy hot bar food and get back to work.  That’s the New York lifestyle, right?

um, I'm supposed to be excited about this or something?

So I thought that something was a little bit f**ked up when my Russian pal Rimma decided to take me to a grocery store hot bar for Russian food.  I had a pretty serious hangover after a long day of Quilmes and a long night of post-Smorgas drinking, and I sometimes get pretty docile when I have a hangover.  So when Rimma sent me a very perky text promising great Russian food in Brighton, I wasn’t in any shape to refuse.

And then we went to a grocery store.  Um, like, OMG WTF?

Before I continue, a little bit of personal history:  when I was a preschooler, my Ukrainian grandmother and Russian grandfather took care of me while my mother attended classes at the local university (go Cyclones!).  Most of my earliest memories revolve around my grandparents’ kitchen and garden.  My grandfather didn’t speak much English (and I was too little to speak all that much, anyway) so we spent our days sharing bits of food, communicating mostly with gestures and a few words of broken English and Russian.

just like grandma and grandpa used to make

I particularly loved all of the fresh vegetables from their garden, which was probably a little bit weird coming for a three-year-old Iowa boy.  Kapusta (Russian for “cabbage”) was one of my very first words in any language, and I was madly in love with my grandmother’s coleslaw—which in no way resembled the disgusting creamy mayonnaise-y goo that they served at the local grocery store.  Grandma let good vegetables taste like good vegetables, just like any other Russian or Ukrainian kitchen wizard.  Seasoning meant a little bit of vinegar and oil and salt and pepper, but rarely anything more potent.

And then there were all of the glorious Russian and Ukrainian baked goods, which were a huge part of my childhood.  I never really developed a taste for American apple pie, but I would run through a wall for my mother’s barely-sweetened apple cake, made with a sour cream crust.  When I visited Russia as an exchange student in the late 1990s, I would visit street kiosks every day for lunch, and eat nothing but a loaf or two of fresh Russian bread.  Screw sandwiches—Russian bread, often stuffed with cheese or meat or spinach or egg or fruit or poppy seeds, was a much better way to fatten myself up during a break in classes.

OK, back to 2010.  My friend Rimma, who immigrated from Russia at age 9, promised to take me to the outer reaches of NYC for “real Russian food.”  And she takes me to a grocery store?  What?

hm... I am getting pretty excited now

Look, Rimma is a real Russian, and I’m just an American kid with some Russian roots.  So when it comes to Russian food, I’m willing to do whatever she says.  But a grocery store… really?

Of course, Rimma knew exactly what she was doing.  We popped into Brighton Bazaar, which has three or four monstrous buffet tables adorning the center of the store.  The hot bar was just like the crap you find on every corner in Midtown, except that it was literally ten times larger—and not crappy.  Far from it.

I’m sure that Rimma and I acted like goofy drunk fools for the next hour or two.  We were like little kids with their noses pressed against the glass window of a candy store, pointing excitedly at things that we hadn’t seen since we were kids.  Rimma went crazy over the endless variety of stinky fish dishes (she has a thing for Russian-style gefilte fish), I pretty much lost my s**t when I saw all of the fresh Russian salads and pickles, and we both slobbered all over the baked goods.  Brighton Bazaar must have offered well over 100 items on that bar, and it made us both punch-drunk with childhood memories.

good stomach

After an hour of circling the store like incompetent vultures, we both settled on a few dishes, crammed inelegantly into ugly clear plastic containers.  I munched on a fish cutlet just so that I could say that I ate something with protein, but it wasn’t really all that earth-shattering—imagine a meatball, but made with fish.  I liked it.  (Rimma wouldn’t touch the stuff:  “Ewww, that’s probably just made from the leftover scraps of other people’s fish.”  Funny.)

But I gorged myself silly on salads—beet salad with potatoes and pickles in a very gentle vinaigrette, fresh pickles that still taste like lightly-salted garden cucumbers, and coleslaw that tasted exactly like grandma’s.  Rimma dined on some not-terribly-stinky fish, and we shared a huge, warm chunk of Khachapuri, a round flatbread filled with egg and salty cheese.  Imagine an inflated piece of Indian naan, stuffed with a beautifully salty fresh mozzarella cheese, and you’ll be close.  (Full disclosure:  Khachapuri is technically a Georgian invention, but I ate tons of the stuff in Russia, so let’s just pretend that it’s actually Russian food.)

very excite!

I probably ate about half my weight in vegetables, which probably isn’t a bad thing.  (My grandfather used to eat tons of cabbage; whenever an American would question him about it, he would tap his lower abdomen and say “good stomach” with a big smile on his face.)  So yeah, my stomach was quite “good” the next day.  (I know that you really needed that image.  You’re welcome!)

Since I was a good boy and ate several pounds of vegetables, I earned a trip to La Brioche, a Russian bakery that sells everything by the pound.  Once again, Rimma and I went into “holy s**t, I haven’t seen that since I was a kid” mode, and ran around acting like fools and filling our plastic containers with cookies, cake, strudel, and chocolate.  I think we terrified a pair of (non-Russian) tourists who asked the taciturn Russian cashier about the apple cake.  The cashier didn’t have much to say, so I started babbling like an idiot, explaining that the apple cake was barely sweetened, and that the crust was made from sour cream, and that I grew up on the stuff.  Rimma and I both started rambling on and on about the fresh

do you think this sign makes me look fat?

pastry filled with poppy seeds, and about the fruit-filled cookies, and about the difference between Russian apple cake and apple strudel.

Eventually, we realized that talking was a wasteful use of our mouths, so we abandoned the store and returned to the serious business of stuffing our faces with as many different baked goods as our “good stomachs” could handle.

Brighton Bazaar
1007 Brighton Beach Ave., Brooklyn
Subway: Brighton Beach (Q, B trains)

Bakery La Brioche
1073 Brighton Beach Ave., Brooklyn
Subway: Brighton Beach (Q, B trains)

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I don’t think that anybody could possibly mistake me for a real food critic, so hopefully you’ll forgive me for writing a completely useless and unfair commentary about a restaurant.

this is what the life of a law student looks like... notice the ibuprofen bottle in the corner

My law student girlfriend (who, incidentally, is nothing more than a rumor these days—if your friend or lover tries to go to law school, do everything you can to talk them out of it) studies with another law student who happens to be married to a Swede.  So we decided to go out for Swedish food.  I’ve never had Swedish food, and I was thrilled that we had a real Swede with us who could act as our food tour guide.

We went to the West Village location of Smorgas Chef, which is part of a small but growing chain of NYC Scandinavian restaurants.  It’s a cute little place, with an intimate feel and some quirky design choices, including dividing walls made from glass bottles.  Our young Swedish server was absolutely adorable, and I highly encourage single straight women and single gay men to stop by to take a look.  He was also a very competent server who took great care of us throughout the meal, but the really important part is that he provided great eye candy.

this is what lingonberry juice looks like... well, at least when you're drunk and your eyes do weird photoshop things to everything around you

With some guidance from our wonderful Swedish friend (the one who happens to be married to another law student—sorry ladies and gentlemen, he’s taken… but he does have lots of time on his hands, and his wife would probably never notice if he… nevermind), we ordered the most typically Swedish items on the menu.  I drank lingonberry juice, partly because I thought it might help me digest the Quilmes and chivito and Guinness I’d consumed throughout the afternoon, and partly because lingonberries are extremely Swedish.  We ate Swedish meatballs ($16) and Swedish gravlaks (cured salmon, $18) for our entrees.  And Amber and I even shared an appetizer of pickled herring ($13).

The herring scared the living crap out of me, because I had actually had pickled herring once before.  When I was a kid, I spent New Year’s Eve with a Norwegian-American family who always ate pickled herring as part of their holiday tradition.  I then spent much of New Year’s Day blowing herring-flavored chunks.

It would have been supremely wussy of me to resist the herring at Smorgas Chef, so I fought back the bad memories (i.e. gag reflex) and ate the stuff, anyway.  It was delicious, to my surprise and relief.  Actually, everything was delicious in that upscale-restaurant sort of way.  The Swedish meatballs were unnaturally round and dainty.  The side dishes (dill potatoes, cucumber salad) were extremely well-manicured, just as one would expect from a classy restaurant.  And the gravlaks tasted like fish, which is apparently how it’s supposed to be.

this time, the chunks of herring didn't make me blow herring-flavored chunks

Here’s the thing:  I don’t get it.  I just don’t really understand classy restaurants, even though I spent a few years of my life working in them.  I love street food and peasant food and any other sort of cheap grungy food that normal, broke-ass people eat.  I’m just not an upscale restaurant guy, I guess.  Veggies picked off a vine and sliced with a dirt-smeared pocketknife are infinitely tastier to me than the elegant little pieces of art found at a place like Smorgas Chef.

I’m sure that the sexy Swedish waiter has a Swedish grandmother who makes Swedish meatballs, but I have a feeling that they’re rougher, bigger, meatier, greasier Swedish meatballs than the ones served at Smorgas–and they probably cost less than $16 a plate.  I’ll also bet that Swedish Grandma knows a thing or two about pickled herring, but I doubt that she serves her herring in a four different fancy sauces on a fancy custom-made four-chambered plate that looked lovely in candlelight.  And I doubt that the cucumber salads at Swedish Grandma’s house are quite so dainty.

I’m not knocking Smorgas Chef as a restaurant.  It’s a well-oiled machine, owned by an Italian-trained Norwegian chef and a former investment banker with Asian roots.  I’m not knocking Swedish food, either—we learned a ton about Swedish food from our friends, and had one hell of a good time.

Trouble is, I just don’t think that Smorgas Chef is all that “Swedish,” and nice restaurants really aren’t my thing.  So if you know of any cheapass Swedish places or if your Swedish grandma wants to make my kitchen smell like herring and lingonberries, email me at unitednationsoffood@gmail.com.

Smorgas Chef, West Village
283 W 12th St., Manhattan
Subway: 8th Ave.-14th St. (A, C, E, L trains)

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Uruguay is probably the world’s greatest country that I don’t really remember going to. Once upon a time, I was a young, broke, dumb, patient lad traveling through South America on a ridiculously small budget. I hitchhiked most of the way from Santiago to Tierra del Fuego, was nearly left for dead on the frozen desert portion of Tierra del Fuego (lesson learned: hitchhiking through uninhabited tundra is a bad, bad idea), and then stuck with buses after that, hopping from the southern tip of Chile back to Santiago, then to Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The latter trip was one of the silliest I ever took. It was supposedly a 52-hour ride from Santiago to Sao Paulo. Yeah, right. We took a winding, indirect route through Argentina, with the bus breaking down once or twice along the way. I have a vague memory of waking up from a nap and realizing that we were in a ridiculously long line of vehicles attempting to pass through Uruguay en route from Argentina to Brazil.

a real chivito... or a portrait of my odor after a 90-hour bus ride across South America

After that, all I can remember is waking up in southern Brazil. I also have a memory of a drag show that spontaneously unfolded in the aisle during our fourth day on the bus. The little 52-hour jaunt turned into a sequin-fueled, 90-hour bus marathon. And by the end, I’m sure that I smelled worse than a goat.

Uruguay? Sadly, I don’t remember a thing. Did we exit the long border line and go around the country? Or did we just drive through it so quickly that I missed it, since I had pretty much fallen completely into bus-trip-zombie mode by then?

It’s too bad that I missed all of the fun in Uruguay, because it always seemed like a pretty interesting place. Most Uruguayans speak Spanish, but part of the country has developed its very own language, a Portuguese-Spanish hybrid called Fronterizo. Uruguay also earns points in my book for being the smallest country (currently about 3.5 million people) ever to win the World Cup (1930 and 1950, plus fourth-place finishes in 1954 and 1970). And Uruguay is the nation that pioneered the deliciously misnamed chivito (“little goat”) sandwich, which is generally hailed as the national dish of Uruguay.

ixnay on the otatopay aladsay... but the chivito sandwich was amazing

Supposedly, the Uruguayan chivito was born in the 1960s in a restaurant called El Mejillon in Punto del Este, Uruguay. A traveler from Argentina ordered a “chivito” sandwich, thinking that she’d receive a plate of baby goat meat, which was popular in her hometown. For some reason that I can’t quite understand from any of the websites I’ve read in English or Spanish, the restaurant instead served her a sandwich of grilled steak, topped with lettuce, tomato, fried egg, ham, and mozzarella cheese, among other things. The story quickly grew into a national legend, and the chivito became Uruguay’s biggest culinary hit.

On our quest for a good NYC chivito, we ventured out to a steakhouse called Parrillada Mi Tio (often listed as “My Uncle’s Steakhouse” on NYC food websites) in Elmhurst. Oddly enough, I spent a summer living around the corner from Mi Tio, and I foolishly assumed that it was an Argentine steakhouse. Silly me.

For anybody out there who doesn’t already know this, Argentine steak is one of the great culinary wonders of the world. Just before the aforementioned trip to South America, I spent seven years as a vegetarian. Then a random, friendly Argentine gentleman invited me to an Argentine steakhouse in Mendoza, and I fell madly in love with tasty dead cow. (Too bad the dead cows served in the United States are rarely as tasty.)

warning: death breath ahead

From what I understand, Uruguayan steak is just is great as Argentine steak: both nations seem to obsess over carefully seasoned, grilled pieces of happy, grass-fed cows. Unsurprisingly, Uruguayan steakhouses seem indistinguishable from Argentine steakhouses—at least in the United States. (Actually, some Uruguayans question whether their country even has its own national cuisine—click here for an interesting discussion in Spanish.) As far as I can tell, you’d never know that an Argentinian steakhouse was actually Uruguayan unless they serve chivitos.

Lucky for us, Parrillada Mi Tio in Queens offered a chivito sandwich ($10.95), though I suspect that most patrons don’t look past the traditional Argentine steakhouse offerings. A steak sandwich might not sound all that thrilling, but there is something decadent about a Uruguayan-style steak sandwich topped with cheese, ham, a fried egg, and fried onions. The steak, unsurprisingly, was a perfectly-grilled, medium-rare slice of filet mignon—about as good as cow can taste in North America. And when the sandwich is served on a fluffy, fresh South American-style roll (little-known fact: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay all have amazing bakeries) with a side of chimichurri (garlic-parsley spread) and aji (hot pepper sauce), the chivito sandwich becomes something that borders on divinity. Hell, the chimichurri itself was almost a religious experience, although my post-chivito garlic breath probably could raise the dead.

I have a funny feeling that Parrillada Mi Tio is the sort of place that will never mess with your steak and Quilmes (Argentine beer, $4.75 for a 16 oz. bottle)—you’re perfectly welcome to assume that the restaurant is just another solid Argentine steakhouse. I’ll wager that the beef is pretty much perfect at this place, no matter what you order. But if you feel like digging through the menu for a chivito—the restaurant’s one little reference to Uruguay—you won’t be disappointed… though anybody who comes near your stinkyass garlic mouth might not be all that impressed.

Parrillada Mi Tio (a.k.a. My Uncle’s Steakhouse)
89-08 Queens Blvd.
Subway: Grand Ave. or Woodhaven Blvd. (R, V trains)

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Poor Romania is one of those countries that couldn’t possibly have chosen a nastier set of historical neighbors. Over the past millennium or so, present-day Romania’s borders have been overrun by invading armies of Mongols, Ottoman Turks, Austrians, Germans, Hungarians, and Russians, just to name a few of the larger powers. For most of Romanian history, it pretty much sucked to be Romania.

It makes me think of the overused proverb about Mexico: it’s a nation so far from God, so close to the United States. Something similar could be said about Romania: so far from God, so close to Germany, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Roman Empire. Yikes.

I mean this in the best possible way, but it’s as if Romanian history is sort of like a group of angry Rottweilers fighting over a dog toy… and Romania was the dog toy.  (An interesting, depressing history of Romania can be found here.)

rumors of soapy skunkiness have been greatly exaggerated

The silver lining for Romania—besides the fact that Romanians are probably tough as nails after everything they’ve been through—is that they adopted some of the culinary arts of all of their historical conquerors. In order to survive as a nation, Romanians have learned to be very creative and stealthy in both geopolitics and the culinary arts, and you have to give them some credit for that.

Case in point: I never once saw the word “sausage” on the menu at Bucharest Restaurant in Sunnyside, but boy, did we ever eat some sausage. That was the stealthiest sausage I’ve eaten in, like, days.

Oh, but there was sausage everywhere.  And it was good.

Before the sausage snuck up on us, I ordered a couple of items that sounded pretty scary, based on my (misinformed) pre-meal online research.  I started with a Timisoreana beer ($6 for a 16 oz. bottle), which was described on a beer website as “too skunky to enjoy,” “mostly offensive,” and “soapy.”

Lighten up, beer review guys.  The Timisoreana was fine.  Better than Schlitz, not as good as Guinness.  Point for Bucharest.  (Unfortunately, the restaurant was out of the fiery Romanian plum brandy known as tuica.)

vegetable soup condiments, Romanian-style

I then ordered a bowl of ciorba de vegetale (“vegetable sour soup”, $3.95), which is supposedly made from fermented grains, among other things.  It sounded revolting.  I loved it.  It tasted almost exactly like the dill-fueled borscht my Ukrainian grandmother used to make.  I tossed a bit of sour cream in there (which also sounds revolting, but tastes great), and nibbled on the accompanying hot peppers between slurps of stew.  Good stuff.  Apparently, there was no stealth sausage hiding in the soup or the beer.

Our entrees, however, were rife with hidden sausage.  I ordered the sarmale, which is generally hailed as the national dish of Romania. According to the menu, sarmale ($10.95) is “stuffed cabbage — meat, grains, vegetable, served with polenta.” My friend ordered tochitura ($11.95), described as a “Transylvanian meat dish served with polenta topped with

right... no sausage here, just "meat, grains, and vegetables"... uh-huh

sunny-side egg up and feta cheese.” Not a word about sausage.

But the sarmale appeared to be a mild sausage wrapped in stewed cabbage leaves.  I didn’t really see any grains or vegetables inside the cabbage, but I’m not complaining at all–the dish was delicious, if a little bit rich and oily.  There was nothing glamorous about the polenta mush (not to be confused with the firm polenta cakes that are fashionable in continental and American restaurants in NYC), but it provided a great counterbalance to the sarmale.  And since I’m from the Midwest, I’m always comfortable with a plate piled with corn.  (Did I mention that I lost my virginity in a cornfield?)

The tochitura (“Transylvanian meat dish”) was similarly stealthy with its sausage.  “Meat” pretty much meant “pork,” which meant that there were several different cuts of pork and sausage.  It wasn’t what we expected, but that’s rarely a complaint in my world.  And again, the polenta (which my dining companion claimed to despise) seemed to work really well as a counterbalance to the sausage–the aforementioned polenta-hating companion actually ate most of her polenta.  And I was very proud of her for that.  Or proud of Bucharest Restaurant.  Or both.

the stealth Transylvanian sausage tastes better than it looks, I promise

Bucharest Restaurant
43-45 40th Street, Queens
Subway: 40th Street (7 train)

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