Senegalese sojourn

Djoliba is a warm and unpretentious
West African eatery

by MARK SLUTSKY

Some of my favourite places to eat barely look like restaurants at all. They look like deps or grocery stores with a food counter—Haitian casse-croute Ange & Ricky, for instance, or South American grocery Supermarché Andes. Something about the bareness of the presentation, and the fact that you can buy many of the ingredients straight off the shelves in the very same place, seems to make for particularly delicious, honest eating.

So I was excited by the presentation of Djoliba, a new Senegalese restaurant on Parc just north of the mountain. Housed in half of what used to be the strange, misnamed 24-hour breakfast institution that was Pizza des Pins, Djoliba’s décor is, shall we say, unpretentious. When we showed up on a recent night to try out its West African cuisine, a handful of tables were lined up in a row, as if we were attending a banquet; weirdly echoing the arrangement were the menus, sitting on the tables uncut, in a single sheet. A lonely space heater sat on the chair at the foot of the table, like the first guest to arrive.

Up a half flight of stairs was the kitchen and cash register, as well as a few shelves of African dry goods: grains, coffee, spices and the like. The operation seemed to be a one-woman show the night we were there. The woman running the restaurant, serving and cooking, was friendly, welcoming and seemed to take real pride in the food she was serving. The room might be unadorned, but the atmosphere is warm and laidback.

We started out by trying the ginger juice ($1.50)—when we asked if it was homemade, we got a look that said are you kidding me? Of course it was. It was delicious, piquant and creamy and rounded out by a hint of pineapple. Homemade bissap (hibiscus) juice is also available ($1.50), though we didn’t try it; that was by choice, but a few other things, like the appetizers, we actually didn’t get to try because they were out of them—at least that means they’re made fresh.

We started out with a plate of allokos ($6), aka fried plantains. They were thick and salty. Satisfying and plain, they actually came to life when we used them to mop up the sauce from our mains. It’d been years since I’d had any mafé so I was happy to see it on the menu ($8). Savoury peanut dishes are my weakness, and this traditional meat stew is one of my favourites. Chunks of beef in a rich, nutty gravy, the mafé was served with a side of white rice which (along with the allokos) soaked up the sauce quite well. We only had one complaint, which was the scarce portion of meat—three pieces in a dish that should have had at least twice as much. It was strange, and I’m willing to believe that it could have been an oversight.

We also tried the yassa ($8), a chicken dish heaped with fried onions in a lemony, fragrant sauce. I always enjoy this dish, and Djoliba’s was no exception—the onions were soft and bursting with flavour, the chicken tender (even though I suspected it had been pre-grilled). That wasn’t the case with the grilled lamb ($12), which seemed to come right off the heat. It was also served with onions, these ones a little different, flavourful but rawer. As if to make up for the mafé, there was plenty of meat on the plate, chewy but flavourful. All of this was served with a little thimble-dish of hot sauce. We were warned in advance, but man was it hot; the little speck I tried on rice felt like it burned a poppy-seed-sized hole through my tongue.

Dessert was interesting. The cook/server/host brought out little bowls of thiakry, a rice-pudding-like African dessert made with fermented yogurt and soft grains. It was unusual, the yogurt to grain proportion so high it was almost like eating a bowl of miniaturized cereal.