Baobab
422 NW 8th Ave.,
241-0390
Lunch 11:30 am-2 pm Mondays-Fridays, dinner 5:30-9 pm Mondays-Saturdays.
Children welcome. Prices moderate.
Picks: Akra (black-eyed pea fritters), mafé (chicken
in peanut sauce), thiebu guinaar (baked chicken stuffed with
onions and pepper), mango tart.
Nice touch: First authentic West African restaurant in
town.
Baobab is a friendly place. Just how friendly? While waiting
for my lunch to arrive I took a few moments to peruse the
batik wall hangings, and a couple seated beneath one banner
noticed my obvious puzzlement about the four represented faces
with unfamiliar names. "They were Senegalese freedom fighters,
combating oppressive French colonialism," said the man. We
chatted for a moment, and they asked me to join them for lunch.
A few minutes later a woman they knew strolled in, and she
too was asked to sit with us. Then the friends embraced Alioune
Kane, the new chef and owner of the restaurant that's named
for the enormous, crooked-branched tree found throughout sub-Saharan
Africa. The couple from Ethiopia and Eritrea and the woman
from South Africa, knowledgeable enthusiasts of the Senegalese
cuisine at Baobab, talked yams and cassavas and groundnut
stews, after which followed a serious discussion about Henry
Louis Gates' recent PBS
program on Africa. Not, in short, your ordinary weekday
lunch in the North Park Blocks.
Baobab is a simple and unpretentious place in the small,
comfortable spot where Square Peg--and before that a garage--used
to be. The restaurant is filled with artifacts from Senegal,
the country that sits on the extreme western bulge of the
African continent.
The menu is small, with several starters, a handful of
entrees and a couple of desserts; but the list offers a
range of Senegalese cooking. It's imperative to begin with
akra, crispy fritters made from black-eyed peas,
minced onion and cayenne, mashed and formed into bean cakes
for dipping in a tomato-chili sauce. Akra are common
street food in Dakar, and they reminded me of Indian pakoras,
though lighter and more delicate. There's a seafood soup,
which is tasty but rather thin, or, if you prefer my dining
partner's euphemism, "texturally austere." A couple of orders
of the akra should give you an appetite for the hearty fare
to come.
You could do worse than share the several chicken dishes
on the menu to see how Senegal treats the bird. In many
sections of the country chicken is a special-occasion food,
so one approaches these dishes with reverence, however peasantlike
and homey they may be. One of the national dishes includes
mafé [may-fay], chicken slathered with a fiery
peanut sauce and accompanied by such root vegetables as
yams, sweet potatoes and carrots, the spice playing against
the sweetness of the tubers. Incidentally, African yams
are not orange-fleshed, like our familiar Louisiana variety,
but white; here they are slightly undercooked to retain
some crunch. The other festival chicken dish is yassa
poulet, the fowl stuffed with olives and carrots and
baked with a tart, lemony, onion-mustard sauce. This dish
comes with a mound of jasmine rice and is traditionally
offered to guests after a long journey. Finally, thiebu
guinaar [cheb-oo-geenar] is another stuffed chicken,
crammed with eggplant, cabbage and cassava (the root from
which tapioca derives) and surmounting a red basmati rice.
Senegal is a coastal nation, so fish is plentiful. Baobab
serves only two such dishes, one called boulette,
deep-fried balls of salmon and halibut, which tend to be
similar in feel to the akra, though sweeter given
the addition of honey. Another famous national dish, thiebu
djen [cheb-oo-jen], is a slab of halibut served with
many of the same ingredients found in the thiebu chicken
recipe. Here, with chopped parsley, scallions, garlic, thyme
and even lime juice, we see the meeting of the tropics and
colonial France. The old government may be gone, but its
culinary influences remain, blended with such ingredients
as peanuts, cassavas and guavas, typical West African thickening
agents, which, added to other starches as a major ingredient,
produce the filling dishes necessary to feed large agricultural
populations that grow many of their own ingredients. Call
it the taming of the stew.
Of the two desserts, a tasty mango tart is open-faced,
again showing a touch of French influence, but the more
unusual sweet is thiakry [cha-kry], a traditional
pudding made from couscous with raisins, yogurt and sour
cream, and sweetened with a bit of pineapple juice--smooth
and refreshing after the filling dinner.
As of now Baobab has no license for alcohol, and while
ice-cold beer would certainly be welcome, especially with
the pyric peanut-sauced dishes, for the time being you'll
have to content yourself with several homemade Senegalese
juices, actually great treats. I especially liked a drink
made from fresh ginger root, which had all the pucker and
heat you want from ginger. The other fine cooler is made
from tamarind, the fruit of a tall shade tree, whose 5-inch
pods contain a pulp that in turn yields a tart yet sweet
syrup. In Africa
the seeds of the baobab tree, called "monkey fruit," are
steeped in water to make a naturally sweet drink, and it
might be interesting to have this authentic native refresher
on the menu as well.
I'm delighted we have this sweet little neighborhood restaurant
in town. You'll be shyly but genuinely welcomed, and while
Senegal will never make a millennial list of the world's
top 10 cuisines, it offers enough complexity and a melange
of flavors to be quite satisfying.
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Willamette Week | originally
published January 12,
1999
|
