![]() ![]() The jollof rice, a West African rice pilau, is a tomato-based dish made with butter, onions, pepper and secret spices. The spiced meat was delectable and grilled to perfection. I dipped the meat in a special blend of dried spices that were served on the side. Suya at Buka New York.įor appetizers, I sampled the suya, thinly sliced beef dusted with peanut, ginger, suya (a Nigerian spice), and herbs. Inspired by his successes, he opened up his own restaurant, Buka, on Fulton Street in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn. “I pride myself on being traditional,” he tells me, in regards to his Nigerian cuisine. His cooking was so good that more and more people started showing up for his food. A self-taught chef and an admitted foodie like myself, he started working at small eateries in New York. (Very Brooklyn.)Ī bit tired from fasting during Ramadan, he nevertheless had energy to discuss his experiences with food, both in Nigeria and here in the United States. Outgoing and friendly, Mashood, owner of Buka, a Nigerian restaurant, is a handsome, bespectacled man with a salt-and-pepper beard, sporting a hipster-style thin-brimmed straw hat. "I wanted to experience things from the source,” he told me one afternoon. Now that I’ve graduated from goat flesh, I think I’m ready for goat eyeballs.Lookman Mashood went traveling throughout the southern states of Nigeria, searching for authentically prepared food. 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 pulled an eyeball out of the sand-colored goo.” 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. 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.Īfter our meal, I accidentally ran across Robert Sietsema’s 2010 review of Buka in the Village Voice. 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. To my surprise, the somewhat exotic-sounding goat stewed in tomato with okra sauce and fufu was a dud. which tastes better than it looks, I promise Unnecessarily detailed picture of Buka's amazing asaro. ![]() I was jealous of my companion for ordering it, and kept picking at her plate whenever she looked away. It was a simple dish, often served as the starchy base for a meat topping, but the spices were rich and delicious. My texture-sensitive companion was (understandably) turned off by the “mouthfeel” of the stuff, but I loved it.įor 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. But damn, it was delicious: a spicy bean pudding, filled with unexpected flecks of fish, olive, and boiled egg. 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. 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). My confused Iowan brothers would probably try to use this to wipe up spilled guava juice 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. 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.Īnd goat? I thought it was a skinky, gamey beast when I first tried it. I love good chicharron now, but that took a few tries. 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 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. 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. Wanna scare my brothers in Iowa? Put this in front of them, and make bleating sounds.
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