On a recent evening, they were presented with lamb, but my table barely noticed, doting on the peas and their companion potatoes, which had hit the precise mark between sturdy and tender.Ī meal may begin with nem, deep-fried but still delicate rice-paper rolls, a recipe handed down by the Vietnamese wives of Senegalese soldiers who fought for the French colonial army in Indochina. Petit pois, fresh green peas, arrive whole and still taste miraculously bright, despite an eternity of stewing. If you’re lucky, there will be a touch of crispy, nearly burnt grains scraped from the bottom of the pot, called khogn in Wolof and akin to Persian tahdig, Korean nurungji and Spanish socarrat.ĭinner is a languorous procession of heavy plates, perhaps laden with a whole tilapia, deeply slashed and crackling, mobbed on one side by sweet fried plantains, or mechoui, Moroccan-style leg of lamb, whose dark gilding swiftly strips away, the flesh underneath ready to capitulate. The plate can barely contain it: red snapper, stuffed with a paste of garlic, onions, peppers and parsley, on a broad stage of rice ruddy from tomato paste and primed with guedj, fermented dried fish, and yete, fermented dried sea snail, funky missives from the sea. No such luck with thiebou djeun, or thieb for short, which is traditionally eaten at noon, with the recommendation of a nap afterward. Some lunchtime dishes are made in such quantities that they last through dinner. In the kitchen, women cooked crowded, fragrant stews by day and men roasted monuments of meat by night. A stairway wound past carvings in illuminated niches to a dining room with faux-marble tabletops, booths and drapes swept back from yawning windows. Takeout was offered below, through a plexiglass shield that grew amber with the years. The space it occupied was small and humble, but in 2005 it turned grand, moving across the street and sprawling over two stories. Samba Niang and Kine (pronounced kee-nay) Mar, natives of Dakar, opened its doors two decades ago on the northern side of West 116th Street in Harlem - a strip that soon after became known as Le Petit Sénégal, in honor of the immigrants who brought French and billowing boubous (ankle-length tunic-gowns) to the neighborhood.Įventually the restaurant acquired the suffix Kine, after Ms. The restaurant was once named Africa, as if embracing an entire continent, when in fact the focus was on the cooking of the western coast, mainly Senegal.
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