I really wanted to believe that it was magic. Suddenly, I was in Bryant Park, with a monstrous steak in front of me. Actually, it was better than that: I had a big ol’ box of Costa Rican casado, an epic combo platter consisting of fried plantains, rice, black beans, a fried egg, some fried pork, and a gently charred steak, roughly the size of a fat skateboard.

yup, looks like Bryant Park

I looked around. Yup, this was New York City. And I had four pounds of Costa Rican food in front of me. I ate it all. And then it dawned on me: is it possible that I (gasp!)… cheated?!

OK, fine: yeah, I cheated. But just a little bit. I went to a restaurant called Olga’s Place in Elizabeth, New Jersey, solely for the purpose of trafficking a massive load of Costa Rican food back to Manhattan. It was kind of lukewarm by the time I reached Bryant Park, but it was still awesome. Really, how can you possibly go wrong with fried plantains, a fried egg, fried pig, black beans, and a skateboard-sized steak?

And while I’m asking rhetorical questions: why aren’t there any Tico-owned Costa Rican restaurants in NYC? You can get tasty Costa Rican food made by a wonderful Honduran in Queens. But there aren’t any Ticos who sell Tico food.

So here’s another question: if you’re from Costa Rica, would you really want to move to NYC? In Costa Rica, there are beautiful beaches, a largely unspoiled cloud forest, warm weather, warm people, fried plantains, and no military. In NYC, there are cramped apartments, crowded beaches, chilly winters, humid trash-scented summers, outrageous rents, and too many spoiled little yappy-type dogs.

way better than a yappy-type dog

We also have food from at least 143 nations, but if that doesn’t blow your hair back… wait, why wouldn’t that blow your hair back, and why wouldn’t you want to live here? I don’t get it.

Anyway, the meal was pretty freaking great, even if it wasn’t exactly at its peak freshness after traveling underneath a river. The enormous steak had a perfect char to it, and it was adorned with my favorite condiment: more fried stuff, plus a thousand calories of rice and beans. Life is good, even if I just earned yet another asterisk.

Olga’s Place
237 Lt. Glenn Zamorski Drive
Elizabeth, NJ

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So when we say the word “country”, what the hell do we actually mean?

Most of us would agree that Taiwan is a country; China and the (other) United Nations definitely disagree. Puerto Rico is technically a territory, but it has its own national soccer team, and it definitely has its own cuisine. And what about Western Sahara or Palestine or Tibet? None are full UN members, but they could arguably be called countries, depending on your politics.

My stomach has its own politics: when in doubt about a certain locale, my stomach calls it a country. More food that way.

So… yeah. Tibet. If you haven’t noticed, there are quite a few Tibetan restaurants in New York, mostly in Jackson Heights – but some are remarkably difficult to notice:

people selling cell phones are apparently louder than momos

Sadly, Lhasa Fast Foods has been temporarily closed for pretty much the entire spring, presumably to excavate itself from the mountain of phone advertisements. But a friendly Nepalese shopkeeper pointed me to Phayul, located a block away, in another easy-to-miss spot above a barbershop.

It wasn’t long before my tongue was completely numb. No, really. We ordered a bowl of tsak sha la kor hot, a stew made from beef, red chilies, thinly sliced daikon, and “mountain herbs.” I asked our server if the “mountain herbs” had a name in English; she called out to one of the chefs, who smiled warmly, waved an open container of a dried fennel-like substance in our direction, and shrugged.

warm, spicy, and pleasantly paralyzing

I’m not making this up: as I slurped the soup, my tongue kept going numb. It wasn’t unpleasant. The culprit seemed to be the peppercorns, not the mountain herbs or red chilies. But I could be wrong.

Our other four dishes didn’t do quite as much to paralyze bits of our faces, but they were equally tasty. We enjoyed a spicy version of stir-fried chicken in a peanut sauce, seasoned with more red chilies:

warm, spicy, and pleasant, but not paralyzing

And then there were some spicy pan-fried potatoes (shogo katsa), with plenty of scallions:

Ewww, vegetables! Wait… what?

Before I continue, here’s a cautionary tale for any parents out there. On this particular evening, I dined with a fascinating woman who works in the Democratic Republic of Congo and has roots in France, Martinique, and Cuba. Her mother fed her blended vegetables until she was 12. Yes, blended – like baby food. Until she was 12.

She hates most vegetables to this day. “You actually eat green onions?” she asked somewhat incredulously, as she plucked them out of her potatoes.

So yeah: vegetable-wrecking is bad.

Anyway, no vegetables were harmed in the making of the momos, the excellent dumplings that are probably Tibet’s best-known dish. Phayul’s are wonderfully juicy on the inside, stuffed with a soupy mix of ginger, cilantro, and in our case, beef. Your chin has been warned.

drippy chin not pictured

And then there was the hearty stew that just didn’t sound quite right: tsak sha dro thuk, translated as beef soup with oatmeal. Oatmeal? Huh?

The stew itself was probably our favorite dish of the evening. It was hearty and beefy and pleasantly salty, with chunks of bone cooked with the oatmeal so that the marrow flavor could seep in. The stew also featured a hint of red chilies, but – for better or worse – it didn’t quite have the firepower to paralyze my tongue again.

Phayul
37-65 74th Street, Queens
Subway: Roosevelt Av./74th St. (E, M, F, R, 7)

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Like any good Iowa boy, I was taught to keep my promises – even if they’re kinda silly. Six years and 142 countries ago, I made two rules for my little food project: 1) each meal has to happen within the five boroughs of NYC, and 2) it has to be prepared by somebody from that country.

But holy crap, this is getting tough. Several Kenyans have passed through my proverbial Rolodex; none have led me to a meal yet, and I’m 100% certain that there are no Kenyan eateries in New York City. But that miskaki stuff sounds awfully good – marinated meat and onions and peppers, served on a sizzling platter with basmati rice.

So screw it: Teaneck, New Jersey, here I come!

When I walked into Addy’s Barbecue, Addy was wearing an Iowa Hawkeyes sweatshirt, which I took as a positive omen, since I’m from Iowa and stuff. I trust a Kenyan in an Iowa shirt do the right thing with meat – or corn – and fire, and I’ll bet that he makes a mean burger or rack of ribs. But he also makes mishkaki, an East African version of meat kabobs.

In some parts of the Middle East and East Africa, mishkaki is served on skewers, but Addy’s version of steak mishkaki is a wee bit more dramatic: it’s served on a sizzling iron skillet, with tons of caramelizing onions and a few jalapeños. The beef had been glazed in cumin, ginger, and tamarind – among other spices – giving the sauce an extra hint of sweetness to balance out the jalapeños.

like a good Lifetime movie: dramatic and steamy

By now, you might be wondering: tamarind and cumin? In Kenyan cooking? But those sound Indian…? As it turns out, Indian flavors have influenced East African cooking for centuries. The Omani sultanate (mostly) controlled Zanzibar from 1698 to 1964, and Omani traders played a key role in the spice trade, introducing Indian techniques and ingredients to the Middle East and East Africa.

If that wasn’t enough, a large Indian diaspora was drawn to Kenya in the late 1800s, initially as workers on the Kenya-Uganda railway, also known as the Lunatic Express because so many people – mostly Indians – died in the construction of the route, including many who were eaten by a notorious pair of lions. People of Indian descent were forcibly expelled from Uganda in the early 1970s, but somewhere around 1.3 million people of Indian descent remain in Kenya today.

Did you say something intelligent about African history? Sorry, I can’t hear you over the smell of basmati rice.

OK, enough history: I was eating a huge plate of seared, seasoned beef, served with basmati rice and a tamarind-topped salad, which makes it hard to think about history. Plus, there was a gigantic mango lassi…

…which causes gigantic brain freeze

There was just one problem: I was still in New Jersey. After I finished my plate of rib-eye mishkaki, I ordered some chicken mishkaki to go. Just so I could, you know, eat it in New York City. The bad news was that it was getting dark, so you can’t really tell that the mishkaki and I were in Herald Square:

hey look, there’s Kenyan food in Manhattan!

So here’s the Kenyan chicken mishkaki in the 34^th Avenue Subway station:

hm, even mishkaki knows how to swipe a Metrocard

The chicken mishkaki loved traveling so much that it begged me for a trip to the Eiffel Tower. I said no, and ate it. The mishkaki, I mean. Not the Eiffel Tower.

So I guess the meal deserves an asterisk. I ate Kenyan food in New York City – it just wasn’t prepared in New York City. Close enough?

Anyway, Addy tells me that he’s working on expanding his menu to include other Kenyan items (ugali!), and might even be eyeballing an expansion into New York City. Go try his food, and tell him to hurry up and cross the river so I can eat Kenyan food more often… and get rid of this darned asterisk.

Addy’s Barbecue
1199 Teaneck Road
Teaneck, NJ

I don’t love the asterisk, so if you know anybody from Kenya or nearby countries (Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Central African Republic) who might be willing to speak with me, please email me at unitednationsoffood@gmail.com or find me on Twitter or Facebook.

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Nuevo Jardin de China is one of those places that I’ve walked past literally 100 times, without really noticing it. Chinese food in Astoria? Meh. Not when there’s baklava and mezedes as far as the eye can see.

But wait… “Nuevo Jardin de China” is, um, Spanish. Fine, it’s probably just one of those places that New Yorkers love to joke about: we have Mexicans who make Chinese food and Chinese immigrants who make tacos. This must be in the latter category, right?

Nope. This is authentic fusion: the restaurant is owned by ethnic Chinese immigrants from Cuba. Chino-Latino food used to be incredibly common in NYC, and there are still more than a dozen NYC restaurants owned by ethnic Chinese from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, or Cuba.

If you’re not a veteran of the New York Chino-Latino scene, Nuevo Jardin can be a little bit disorienting. The staff all look Chinese, the small TV above the bar shows Sinovision, and the bar features gooey tiki-bar-type drinks. But the stereo was blaring salsa music when I walked in. I could swear that the Hello Kitty statue was totally moving her hips instead of just her paw.

Anyway, I was mostly curious about the “Latino” part of “Chino-Latino food”, so I ordered the lunch special of ropa vieja to go – literally, “old clothes,” a Cuban dish consisting of beef simmered in peppers and onions until it disintegrates into soft threads of meat.

Once I opened my to-go bag, I was even more disoriented. The bag contained odd array of condiments: sweet and sour sauce, soy sauce, butter, Italian dressing and a slice of lemon (for the iceberg lettuce salad), and two fortune cookies. The ropa vieja was also served with a chunk of baguette and shrimp-and-pork fried rice.

my stomach is about to feel great, but my brain really hurts just looking at this

The ropa vieja looked and tasted like typical Americanized Chinese food: the beef and onions and peppers were stewed in a sweet, unnaturally red sauce – sort of like the sweet and sour pork sauce at, say, Panda Express. It wasn’t what I expected, since it didn’t remotely resemble any other ropa vieja I’d ever eaten before. I ate half of the dish, then put it aside while I survived a three-hour work meeting. I wasn’t excited to eat more of it.

After my meeting, I ate the other half anyway. Because, you know, it was food, and it happened to be in the same room as me. And a funny thing happened: I actually enjoyed it. Yeah, the sauce was on the sweet side, but not unpleasantly so, and it had a nice onion flavor to it. The fried rice seemed incongruous at first, but it was actually pretty good, and the extra bits of meat and egg and shrimp and oil mellowed out the sweetness of the sauce.

on closer inspection… shiny, but not bad!

So here’s the thing: at first, my not-totally-open mind was playing mean tricks on my stomach. When I expected Cuban ropa vieja, I thought the dish was gawdawful. But as soon as I forgot my expectations and energetically stuck my snout into the leftovers… well, it was actually a pretty tasty meal.

So yeah, maybe Chinese ropa vieja doesn’t seem to make much sense at first. And neither does a salsa-dancing Hello Kitty statue. But both could be kinda cute, right?

Nuevo Jardin de China
32-05 Broadway, Astoria, Queens
Subway: Broadway (N, Q trains)

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As is often the case these days, I’ve bent over backwards to find Gambian food, and I keep failing… but sometimes, that isn’t so bad:

• Gambian food fail #1: My wife’s brother’s ex-wife’s friend’s husband said that he knew a few Gambians who might be able to cook for me. Several emails and a few phone calls later, nothing happened. I tried to bribe them with Nigerian food, but I think they got tired of hearing from me.
• Gambian food fail #2: A few weeks ago, I found an oh-so-faint internet ghost of a Gambian restaurant on Walton Avenue in the Bronx. I went there to investigate, and it was long gone, converted into a barbershop.
• Gambian food fail #3: After leaving the barbershop, a friendly customer at a nearby bodega gave me vague directions to a restaurant that might serve Gambian food. (“Go down 169^th, cross Webster, go down the hill, and it’s somewhere around there.”) I found the restaurant, but the owner was Ivorian. He insisted that he’d never heard of any Gambian-owned restaurants – even though we were in a Gambian neighborhood.

but at least my new Ivorian friend fed me some nice acheke and fried fish…

• Gambian food fail #4: After stuffing myself with (non-Gambian) fried fish and acheke, I made a 45-minute trek to a restaurant called Fouta, which had at least one Gambian dish — super kanja — on the menu. But the place was owned by a Senegalese family.
• Gambian food fail #5: One of my very favorite food writers – Dave Cook at Eating in Translation – found a Gambian chef at Nabaya Restaurant in the Bronx, formerly known as Bate. To celebrate, I went to Nabaya with six friends, including Dave. But Dave was the victim of some miscommunication on his previous visit: the owner is from Guinea-Conakry, and her kitchen staff is from Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso.

I’d cry into my ginger beer, but I got another great meal out of the situation, and can’t be upset. Nabaya may not be Gambian, but it’s awfully delicious.

ginger beer and sorrel; white-boy tears not pictured

I think this is one of the least-upsetting tables I’ve ever seen, especially since it includes acheke (toasted, shaved cassava, served with a spicy onion-and-pepper sauce and a ground-up Maggi cube) and a nice cassava leaf stew, among other treats:

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with a nice plate of braised lamb shanks:

Or baked fish, served with a spicy onion sauce:

Or guinea fowl, stewed in tomato sauce with a nice habanero pepper:

Or thiebou djeune – jolloff rice with fish, yucca, carrots, and a dark chile paste:

And you can’t go wrong with roasted chicken in another spicy onion sauce:

Or lamb dibi, featuring fried lamb with fried onions:

So yeah: I’ve failed to get Gambian food on five different occasions. But I ate so much lamb and fish and acheke that I can’t even be upset about the tall dude with the big camera who seems to be preventing the other dudes from eating. When the food is this good, why whine?

Nabaya Restaurant
860 Melrose Avenue
Subway: Yankee Stadium (4, D trains)

Do you know any Gambians or Mauritanians who might be willing to prepare a simple dish, or at least have a good conversation about their native cuisines? If so, email me at unitednationsoffood@gmail.com, or find me on Twitter or Facebook.

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