One of the things that makes my porky heart hurt is when wonderful, hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants close down. El Karnak, that fun Egyptian spot I visited in Astoria? Long gone, replaced by a Yemeni restaurant called Maya Cuisine. You know I love Yemeni food, but NYC was a distinctly more enjoyable place when you could go to Astoria and take revenge on pigeons.

By dumb luck, I stumbled upon a suitable Egyptian replacement for El Karnak in a surprising place: 10^th Avenue and 47^th Street in Midtown West, far from the Middle Eastern culinary nirvana of Astoria.

My hips don’t lie. Er… I mean, this menu doesn’t lie.

At a glance, Taxi appears to offer little beyond standard Middle Eastern chow; koshary is the only uniquely Egyptian offering on the menu. We had a good feeling about the place – it’s called Taxi, so that means that it must cater to cabbies, right? And NYC cabbies often know a thing or two about international food. So that’s good.

Our first round of dishes weren’t particularly exotic: shish tawook (chicken kabobs), tabouli salad, and babaganouj. As soon as we ordered, we could hear the sound of vegetables being chopped in the kitchen – and we were the only ones there, which made me think that the tabouli salad was being made to order, much like the food in my favorite Astoria Palestinian spot.

And yep, that’s exactly what was going on: we had unwittingly stumbled into an evangelical house of fresh Middle Eastern food. I freaking love a good tabouli salad, and this was the best I’ve eaten in literally decades – idiotically fresh, with a generous dose of salt, lemon, and parsley. I even told the owner that I thought the tabouli was the best I’d eaten. He immediately started ranting and raving in a totally charming way, with lots of gratuitous exclamation points: “Yes, it is the best!!! You know why? Most places, they make a big batch, enough for 30, 40 people. Today, maybe 10 people order it. Tomorrow? Maybe five. Next day? No good!! We make everything here! Everything!! You order, I put the bulghur in hot water! We chop the vegetables. If they bring you tabouli right away, no good!!…”

But this is definitely good. (!!!!!!!, etc.)

He kept going, and I immediately loved this man like a brother. Even the hot sauce – nearly identical in appearance to the “red sauce” offered at every NYC halal stand – was clearly handmade, with a nice hint of citrus. The babaganouj? Mashed to order. The chicken kabobs were thoughtfully prepared, and served with a delicious, salty side of fresh peppers, pan-fried in olive oil.

Yep, mashed to order. (and also: !!!!!!)

The two of us weren’t exactly hungry after eating all of that, but ordered a plate of hummus and some eggplant salad anyway, and inhaled all of it on a train to Connecticut. (Yes, we ordered five dishes for two people. No, there weren’t any leftovers. Yes, my head is hollow and is useful only as backup food storage.)

So you know how hummus is one of those things that’s almost always good, but rarely mind-blowing? On a scale of 1 to 10, I didn’t think that hummus could do much better than a 7. I really like hummus, but it’s not the world’s most interesting food. Our new Egyptian friend proved me wrong: it took 20 minutes for the hummus to emerge from the kitchen, and it was clearly a different breed of hummus, with a tasty sprinkling of fresh parsley, a generous garlic flavor, and a deeper sesame taste than you usually encounter in hummus. It was still lukewarm, and I suspected that even the tahini was produced to order.

The eggplant salad was borderline mind-blowing. I’ve eaten my share of Middle Eastern eggplant salads over the years, and it’s always been served cold, pulled straight from the fridge. Not at Taxi: the stuff was still warm, as addictive as Percocet, and served with a side of pita and another passionate speech (with lots of extra exclamation points!!) about the importance of fresh, handmade food.(!!)

The total for five dishes: $36, including tax. I don’t think our new favorite Egyptian chef charged us for the speeches or for the side dish of exclamation points. But maybe he should have.

And he definitely should have charged us for taking such crappy pictures of his food on a train. (oh, and another thing: !!!!!!!!)

Taxi Restaurant
691 10th Avenue
Subway: 50th Avenue (A, C, E trains)

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Hm, the word “lunch” immediately follows my name on a menu. Somebody must be a genius?

At the risk of sounding like an untrendy culinary grinch, I’m often ambivalent about pedigreed chefs who were trained in fancy culinary academies. Sure, I thoroughly respect the hard work of chefs who learned some great skills in culinary school, and I’ll happily devour their delicious food. But I’m much more interested in unlikely chefs who took an unusual route to their careers as genius food-makers.

The amazing Aimé Badjoko is exactly one of those chefs. Aimé was born in Kisangani, the second-largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo (also known as Congo-Kinshasa to distinguish it from its smaller neighbor, the Republic of the Congo; click here for a brief, well-written introduction to the two Congos from a traveler’s perspective). When he was five years old, Aimé’s family sent him to a small village in Belgium; when Aimé was 14, his father moved all ten of his children into a house in Brussels – including several children who had not previously lived in Belgium. It sounds like a fascinating breed of mayhem, since the ten “children” – a few of whom were young adults by then – were not accompanied by their parents.

Aimé’s path to chefdom (look at me, I’m making up words!) is every bit as interesting as his childhood. He studied economics as a university student, and didn’t cook at all until he was married with three kids in Belgium. His wife didn’t cook either, so Aimé bought a few cookbooks (including La Cuisine d’Olympe and Alain Senderens’ first book), memorized pretty much every recipe in the darned things, and realized that cooking is his true calling.

Fast-forward a few years, and Aimé is now in New York, bringing his own blend of Belgian and Congolese flavors to his catering business, called Badjoko. As his website suggests, his food isn’t strictly Belgian, and it isn’t strictly Congolese, either. But because I’m doing this silly quest thinger, I invited him out for coffee and asked if he might be willing to prepare Congolese food for me. I loved his answer: “OK, I’ll make a few Congolese dishes. I don’t know what yet. But they will be delicious.”

As promised…

Of course, Aimé was 100% correct, and he graciously delivered a monstrous bag of his delicious cuisine to a business meeting that I was attending in Chelsea with a woman named Meg, who is more important than I am. Despite being kind of a big deal, she was very gracious, and let us feed her whatever Aimé felt like feeding us. The food was, exactly as Aimé promised, absolutely phenomenal: makiso chicken served with yellow rice and Wagenia spinach, followed by a dessert of crème of two chocolates.

Normally, I would ramble on with descriptions of the dishes, but I’ll shut up for a moment, and quote directly from the lovely menus that Aimé printed for us, since my new favorite caterer is a better food writer than I am:

Makiso chicken: “Kisangani style chicken, stemming from Indian influences in the Eastern part of Congo, consisting of nutmeg, turmeric, and other spices.”

Yellow rice: “Local rice infused with clove and turmeric from the same Indian inspiration that touched Kisangani.”

Wagenia spinach: “Referring to the fishermen on the Congo River; spinach with smoked fish*” (*replaced with smoked pork belly)

Mmm… pork belly

Yes, smoked pork belly. All three dishes were spectacular, but there’s a special place in my heart for beautiful plates of stewed greens (did I mention that I grazed on my mother’s houseplants when I was a toddler?), especially when the greens are blessed by the presence of salty, smoky chunks of pig, with a perfect blend of lean pig and fat pig.

For bonus points, everything was packaged and presented beautifully; even the dessert of crème of two chocolates (“…the cacao beans used here are one of the wonders of the Congolese rainforest…”) was served in actual glassware, in addition to being ludicrously delicious. This was easily the classiest meal I’ve ever eaten as take-out.

My only complaint? Badjoko is a catering company, not a restaurant, so Aimé’s excellent cuisine is only available for large groups. If he ever decides to open a Congolese and/or Belgian restaurant, I’ll be camped out at the front door, ready to eat the first goodies that emerge from his kitchen.

But in the meantime, can I please borrow your corporate AMEX card, and pretend that I’m a large group? Please?

Badjoko
Catering only

If I only I were capable of taking classier photos while dining with people who are more important than I am…

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This seems to be a thing lately: my path to a good Tunisian meal in NYC has been filled with a few screw-ups, mostly of my own making.

• Tunisian food fail #1: I had heard great things about Bistro Lamazou, a restaurant owned by the Tunisians who brought us the always-excellent Lamazou Cheese Shop. The bistro was walking distance from my apartment. I didn’t try to go there until after it had closed. Oops.
• Tunisian food fail #2: The nice Tunisians in the cheese shop recommended that I speak with the Tunisian chef at an ostensibly French restaurant on the Lower East Side. I walked in, and asked the chef if he would prepare a Tunisian meal if I brought in a large crowd. He said sure, and told me to email him to set everything up. I did. He never responded. I probably should have taken the hint when the email address he gave me included the words “mean chef.”
  

  Tunisian fries are less mean than some chefs, apparently

• Tunisian food fail #3: In a chance encounter in a Midtown Subway restaurant (don’t judge!), I asked a Tunisian diplomat where I could get a good Tunisian meal in NYC. He pointed me to Steinway Street in Astoria, but couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant. So I walked into random stores on Steinway, asking if they knew about this mythical Tunisian restaurant. Turns out it had closed just a few weeks before I started snooping around.

I’m apparently bad at finding Tunisian food. But I’m trying, I swear!

I’m pretty good at eating, though.

Fast-forward a year or two, and there’s now a Tunisian-owned restaurant in Williamsburg, called La Goulette. The restaurant is basically an upscale counter-service place, serving a variety of Middle Eastern standards like shawarma, kabobs, merguez (sausage), falafel, stuffed grape leaves, and salads.

if I eat enough of these, then I’m not really a failure, right?

Technically speaking, I ate a large, delicious Tunisian meal at this Tunisian-owned restaurant. Along with a posse of seven pals, I inhaled some outstanding falafel, a nice mildly-spicy rendition of merguez, some lamb and chicken kabobs, some fantastic roasted cauliflower and artichokes with labanah (a.k.a. “yogurt cheese”), and plenty of hummus, rice, and Tunisian carrot salad. The meats were all nicely grilled, the vegetables were ludicrously fresh, and the falafel was about as good as it gets. La Goulette is a good place. You should eat there.

The only hitch: if I didn’t know that the owners were Tunisian, I probably wouldn’t know that anything there was Tunisian. Sure, the word “Tunisian” appears a few times on the menu – there’s Tunisian carrot salad, Tunisian fries (sprinkled with parsley and Parmesan) and merguez with “Tunisian spices.” I even asked one of the cooks what made the food Tunisian, and he said, “Well, we’re Tunisian. We use Tunisian spices. They’re really good!”

He was 100% correct. The spices were really good – as they often are in a solid Middle Eastern or North African restaurant. But I worried that I was missing out on some traditional Tunisian treats, like brik or couscous or tajin or seafood. But after four attempts at Tunisian food, I decided… well, screw it, I figured I’d make one last attempt to track down bonus Tunisian food. I wandered into Saba, a Yemeni restaurant in Astoria, based solely on a torrid rumor that the restaurant serves Tunisian food on Fridays. I even called ahead to confirm that the Friday food was Tunisian, but had no luck getting an English-speaker to answer the phone.

pretty sure that Yemeni chicken curry is tastier than stewed pink elephant seasoned with beach balls

So I showed up on a Friday with three friends, and inquired about Tunisian food. Technically speaking, that was Tunisian food fail #4: the confused server just said, “Yemeni food every day,” as if I’d asked for a plate of stewed pink elephant seasoned with beach balls.

And then we saw the footnote on the menu: Saba had couscous on Fridays! And it was Friday! We were in luck. Except that we weren’t: the server informed us that there was no couscous that day. There were, however, acres of fresh Yemeni flatbread, an excellent version of hummus topped with a deliciously olive-y olive oil, and a phenomenal appetizer translated as “chicken curry” that consisted of pan-fried chicken with scallions and jalapeños.

the nice people at Saba soaked the bread in lamb juice for us!

For our entrees, we shared Zorbian chicken — basically, a Yemeni version of chicken biryani — along with meat fettah, chunks of lamb stewed with spices and more acres of Yemeni bread. The fettah was amazing – it was as if the chef knew that we were getting too lazy and food coma-ed to soak our own bread in the lamb juice, so he did it for us.

As great as those dishes were, the real star was the fahsa, an outstanding pan of sizzling shredded lamb cooked with piles of fenugreek. Easily a candidate for the best dish I’d ever eaten while trying to order Tunisian food. Who knew that fenugreek was so damned delicious?

So yeah… attempt #5 at Tunisian food? Fail. Just like attempts #1-3. But man, it was a darned tasty fail. I need to fail like that more often.

non-Tunisian fahsa, sizzling until it’s kinda blurry

La Goulette
159 Grand Street, Williamsburg
Subway: Bedford (L train) or Metropolitan (G train)

Saba
25-75 Steinway St.
Subway: 30th Avenue (N, Q trains)

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Before I tell you about a perfectly spectacular Armenian meal, please allow me to whine a little bit about my own incompetence. Over the past several years, I’ve made four attempts to track down a legit Armenian meal. None of the first three worked worth a poop.

• Attempt #1: I dragged three friends—including an Armenian pal—to Garden Bay Café in Sheepshead Bay, roughly a 2.5-hour round-trip from my then-home in Midtown. Trouble was, some idiot (this buttmunch) neglected to call ahead, and the restaurant was long gone, replaced by a short-lived House O’ Uzbek Horse Meat. It was delicious, but not Armenian.
• Attempt #2: After the aforementioned Armenian friend said that I shouldn’t bother visiting Sevan, NYC’s only remaining Armenian restaurant, he promised to make an Armenian meal for me. Then he started dating a model, was admitted to an Ivy League MBA program, and suddenly had better things to do than cook for my jiggly, non-model self. (I’d be offended, except that I’d probably happily trade myself in for a model if I could. Or a nice plate of nachos. Either way.)

would also trade myself in for a half-dozen of these

• Attempt #3: I finally gave up on the home-cooked Armenian meal, and trekked over to Sevan on a sunny winter afternoon. (Nope, it’s not winter. Yes, I might be a ludicrously lazy blogger.) Sevan is located in Bayside, Queens, which I think might technically be part of, like, Vermont or something. A three-hour round trip to Bayside got me nowhere: the restaurant was closed, and some idiot (this buttmunch again) had neglected to call ahead. I nibbled on some tasty cheese pies and choreg (sweet bread) from the bakery, but ultimately felt really, really dumb for yet again stupiding myself out of a full Armenian meal.

And that brings me to Armenian attempt #4. I called ahead. I brought a posse of five friends, including zero Armenians. We ate Armenian food. It didn’t suck.

stuff will be on fire later in this post, and that never sucks

But at the beginning of the meal, I was vaguely worried that the place might kind of suck, partly because the aforementioned Armenian pal insisted that Sevan was pretty lousy. (Then again, the dude is dating a model and attended an Ivy League MBA program, so maybe his standards are out of control?) The six of us exchanged perplexed glances after we received room-temperature pita bread with butter (huh?), followed by a thoroughly bland rendition of babaganoush.

But then everything got much, much better once we realized that babaganoush isn’t particularly Armenian.

As we started munching on Sevan’s back patio, the waiter informed us that the restaurant mostly caters to large groups. On this particular Friday night, the indoor dining area was populated by a bunch of bespeckled old farts watching a presentation about how social media is ruining society. (Click here to follow me on Twitter, bespeckled old farts.) Aside from the creaky angry mob of social media haters, we were Sevan’s only customers.

Fortunately, this meant that Arthur, Sevan’s owner and chef, had time to drop by our table. We explained that we were specifically interested in Armenian food, not just general central Asian cuisine.

After that, everything was absolutely peachy.

As it turns out, only a fraction of the dishes on the menu were truly Armenian. The chef emphatically gestured toward a few dishes on the menu: “Pelmeni. That’s Russian. Forget about that! Khinkali. That’s Georgian. Forget about that! You want manti. That’s Armenian! You want kabobs! Our spices are Armenian, nobody makes kabobs like us…”

sujuk — you know, the thoughtful sausage

So we did exactly what the nice Armenian chef told us to do. We munched on basturma (a mild Armenian rendition of ham, similar to prosciutto); sujuk (a spectacular cumin-spiked Armenian beef sausage, vaguely reminiscent of an unusually thoughtful salami); a deliciously lemony, house-made Armenian version of stuffed grape leaves; a spectacular Armenian salad loaded with an imported Armenian spice I’d never heard of; and some excellent filo dough-wrapped spinach and cheese pies, vaguely similar to Greek spanikopita or Maltese pastizzi.

And then there was the manti, which deserves a prize as one the more novel versions of dumplings I’ve encountered in NYC. Most dumplings (Ukrainian vareniki, Mongolian buuz, Georgian khinkali, etc.) are wonderful and speak for themselves; no adornment is usually provided. Interestingly, Sevan’s manti were relatively petite—roughly the size of small beef-stuffed tortellini—and topped with a drizzle of garlicky sour cream and a sauce that tasted like ripe tomatoes. Genius.

tastier than most supermodels… I think?

And those kabobs that the chef raved about? They were both flashy and delicious, served on sword-sized skewers on a still-flaming platter (which, incidentally, is pathologically difficult to capture in a photo if you’re as sh*tty of a photographer as I am). We opted for the mixed grill combo for four people ($56 for a mix of beef, chicken, and lamb kabobs) and the meat didn’t disappoint: everything was perfectly seasoned and cooked, without even a hint of toughness, just as Chef Arthur had promised.

So yeah, that Ivy League Armenian dude who was dating a model? Well, he was wrong: Sevan is pretty darned good, especially if you eat exactly what the nice chef tells you to eat. By now, that Ivy League guy probably has a Rolls-Royce and a house full of supermodel children. But I’m not jealous: I ate my face full of manti and flaming kabobs. Who needs a model?

dressing a salad with herbs imported from Armenia is probably cheaper than dressing a supermodel

Sevan Restaurant
216-07 Horace Harding Expressway, Queens
Transit: Q27 or Q30 bus to the ends of the NYC earth
…but it’s worth the trip, I swear

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My wife likes to say that United Nations of Food NYC isn’t really a food blog – it’s a cry for help. Yeah, I agree: it’s an online cry for help finding interesting international food. At least I think that’s what she meant…?

Anyway, a friendly Maltese-American reader heard my cry for help last week, and sent assistance in the form of a thoroughly entertaining email (thank you, Rachael!). Here’s a snippet:

I know that you’re in pursuit of foods from countries that have more than one million residents—but how about foods from countries that have less than half a million residents, but more than twice the amount of national pride? That has to count for something.

(For the record, if a country has less than a million residents but more than three calories, sign me up!)

Picture Malta, an archipelago in the heart of the Mediterranean ocean. Beautiful beaches (I mean really beautiful. Tom Cruise and Madonna are both frequent visitors, probably because it’s the last country anyone’s ever heard of and the closest thing this planet has to paradise. Did I mention that Britney Spears is ¼ Maltese?), friendly people, and yummy food. Authentic dishes range from the street-food pastizzi (stuffed filo pastry, usually with ricotta, meat, or peas) to rabbit stew. Wouldn’t you know it, you can get some of these authentic foods right here in NYC. We even have a Maltese Center in Astoria.

Ooh, rabbit stew and stuffed filo pastry! That sounds awesome. I wiped the drool off my keyboard (related: I don’t recommend touching my keyboard unless you’re either wearing gloves or have a strange drool fetish), hurried through a lamentably low-calorie meeting, and raced to Leli’s bakery in Astoria.

Charming, no?

Leli’s is a thoroughly charming place, serving a glorious variety of cookies, breads, cakes, sandwiches, quiches, and drinks. I resisted the urge to snuffle through all of Leli’s offerings, and instead told the friendly Maltese owner that I wanted to try everything that could be considered Maltese. She smiled, and immediately pointed to the pastizzi. (I may or may not have drooled on command. Normal people totally do that… um, right?)

Pastizzi are savory filo-dough pastries, vaguely reminiscent of spanakopita or boureks. Leli’s offers three types: ricotta cheese, spinach & ricotta cheese, and beef & pea ($1.75 each). I ordered two of each flavor, and ate all six as I walked through Astoria; each pastizzi was a little bit larger than my fist, and all were delicious. (Related: my fists are starting to develop double chins of their very own.)

six pastizzi (two half-digested specimens not pictured)

The pastizzi appeared to be the work of somebody with some serious baking talent: crispy, flaky layers of filo on the outside, with softer, moister layers of dough once you get past the initial layer of crunch. The spinach & ricotta pastizzi reminded me of a perfectly baked version of the individually wrapped Greek spanakopita that I grew up with, but with the sharpness of Greek feta replaced by the creaminess of a nice ricotta. I was also pretty excited about the beef and pea pastizzi, which seemed to feature a hint of clove.

sorry, I can’t hear anything over the smell of fresh, round bread

The only other Maltese item at Leli’s Bakery was Maltese bread, served in a variety of shapes and sizes; I opted for a medium-sized round roll (generously comped by the owner), since “round” is one of my favorite shapes. Even though the bakery was busy, the friendly (non-Maltese) woman at the counter kindly took the time to explain that the Maltese bread was deliciously crusty on the outside, soft on the inside, and possessed a mild sourdough flavor. She even explained how, exactly, the Maltese bread was different from other sourdough breads. But because I’m a terrible person with a one-track mind, I can’t tell you much of what she said, because I just couldn’t hear anything over the smell of fresh-baked bread.

The Maltese bread was delicious, even after… well, this is embarrassing, but I brought half the loaf home to my wife, and she put it in the refrigerator by accident and completely forgot about it, which I’m pretty sure is a violation of several international treaties with Malta. The crazy part? It was still delicious two days later, after a quick cameo in the oven.

But yeah, I probably violated Maltese law by letting that bread land in the fridge. Extradite me to Malta, somebody? Please? Maybe they’ll feed me that Maltese rabbit stew in prison.

Huge thanks to Rachael Xerri for the tip! If you can help me find the elusive Maltese rabbit stew or other tough-to-find ethnic cuisines, email me at unitednationsoffood@gmail.com or find me on Twitter (@UNofFoodNYC) or Facebook. If you invite me to a meal, I promise not to drool on your keyboard.

Leli’s Bakery
35-14 30th Ave., Astoria
Subway: 30th Ave. (N or Q train)

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