The long-awaited food post

Editor's note: I actually started writing this post at the beginning of November. It's just never seemed as urgent as the ones that have made it up before now. Apologies to Trish, Brubs, McKee, Andre, and anyone else to whom I promised this post was coming "shortly". Though I clearly lied to you, I assure you I never did so with malicious intent.


I've lived in Sierra Leone for 5.5 months and I've eaten food prepared in my home exactly once. Even then, I didn't cook it.

Depending on your perspective, this is either damn impressive or downright pathetic. I clearly choose the former. At this clip, I'll annihilate even my year of Pilot Pita, Subway, Pizza Pizza and Ethel's, when I still occasionally returned to K-town for a delicious homemade meal, or even made myself such culinary complexities as Campbell's Chunky soup.

But whether owing to or in spite of my one-man support of the world's restauranteurs, no one that knows me would ever accuse me of taking the topic of food lightly. Eating is a passion, one that often manifests itself in neurotic patterns of ingestion - as evidenced by my self-imposed challenge of sampling the entire Ethel's Lounge menu before my departure.

And the food of Sierra Leone has generally sat well with me.

In our first week, we were introduced to a bunch of Western-friendly joints in Freetown, the vast majority of them run by the country's Lebanese entrepreneurial class. Admittedly, these places are good to know, as they offer something a little more familiar to the palate that even the most well-adjusted expat needs on occasion.

That said, I find that they're mostly overpriced and their Western dishes are sub-par imitations of the real thing. For example, save for the heaven-sent Bliss Patisserie where I sometimes hunker down on weekends to revel in free electricity, I've yet to have a good hamburger in Sierra Leone. They appear on most menus, but all seem to have been unfortunately re-interpreted - always swimming in mayonnaise and/or coleslaw to the point that the bun disintegrates into saucy chaos.

After a couple failed forays elsewhere, I've resolved to stick with a bi-weekly Bliss Burger to sate my carnivorous impulses; otherwise I'll wait until I find my footing on Canadian soil, when my loyalties return with increased fervor to my old friends: the Harvey's double original bacon cheeseburger, the A&W mozza burger, and the Big Ethel (refer to page 3).

Ground meat debacles notwithstanding, I've really hit my stride with the food here and for every example of an item the country's cooks have yet to master, there's a corresponding dish with which they put Western chefs to shame.

Take rice. It's a cheap staple food, which is immediately enough to qualify it for ubiquity. And while I generally approach rice with all the enthusiasm of watching that frustratingly awful Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, most places here actually do it quite well.

First off, there's jollof rice, pictured below at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant named Nix Nax where I was eating up to five times a week a couple months back, and where my roommates and I are among the only white patrons. Such loyalty has nonetheless failed to earn me so much as a smile from the waitresses in this customer service-starved society.



For $2, you get a rice unlike anything back home, imbued with a semi-spicy flavour all its own, instead of merely taking on the taste of the food around it, as per rice's modus operandi.

And the spicy food doesn't end with the jollof. Potato leaves. Cassava leaves. Crain Crain. Groundnut stew. All come with rice and a healthy level of spice - nothing particularly overpowering, but enough to ensure that your tastebads are at least awake. (Sidenote: I have to question how healthy they are, as they never skimp on the oil, necessitating a careful wiping of the lips at the meal's conclusion.)

Cassava leaves and groundnut stew (shown below, in that order) are probably my two favourite Salone dishes. They're also the most prevalent, available for purchase at every 'chop house' in town.




Each dish inevitably comes with morcels of fish or beef/goat floating in the bowl, making vegetarianism nigh impossible here in SL. Given the nation's less-than-stellar treatment of our animal brethren, such an attitude of non-accommodation towards broccoli-heads (a term of endearment I apply to vegetarians because I agree with them on a philosophical level and lash out in my bitterness at not sharing their willpower) comes as little surprise.

There are other Salone dishes to be had, of course. Acheke (pronounced, as far as I can tell "aah-check-ay", though I've never seen it spelled the same way twice) is pretty popular, though it's about the only thing I've had here that I found disdainful. It seemed to me to be simply a mish-mash of erstwhile leftovers that complimented each other poorly. Yam pepper soup is another one that springs to mind, though with much more favourable rememberances.

Interestingly, I've found my moderate familiarity with the country's cuisine surprises many Sierra Leoneans. I've had co-workers and random friends on the street ask me with a glib smile if I've ever tried cassava leaves and look somewhat astonished when I say I love them and eat 'em all the time, then begin listing off my other favourites.

Precisely why this comes as a surprise I'm not yet sure. Eating local cuisine seems to me like one of the easiest ways to connect to a culture, and I hope the reason some Sierra Leoneans are surprised is not because many of my white predecessors have shunned the country's culinary tradition. The food here has its definite flaws - such as the frequency with which you inadvertently chomp down on a sliver of bone or even a pebble - but it certainly deserves a sampling.

Outside of Nix Nax and the other chop houses, my familiar haunts include Delightful Fast Food, which serves lots of African cuisine as well as a decent chicken and chips; Montana's, home to the best pizza in Freetown; and my much-lauded Senegalese restaurant, where everybody knows my name and I their's (Emile, Christoph, Pascal, Fatu, Sheku, and Haja/Kairie).

Senegalese is another hybrid joint serving African cuisine, though I generally opt for their succulent roast meat or grilled fish (pictured below, with fried plantains, a sweet delicacy).




And that segues nicely into two other areas Freetown dominates the kitchen's back home: fruit and fish. Fruits - bananas, oranges, mangos, papayas - are predictably bursting with flavour, juicy and tropically delicious. But it's the seafood that really blew me away.

Back home, save for mussels, I generally work on the assumption I don't like seafood. Turns out that's only 'cause I don't live by the sea. All along the Western peninsula, crab, lobster, barracuda and bonita are served up as an affordable feast, and I've become a full-on convert - though I think this newfound appreciation will die a tragic death if I sample surf fare in southwestern Ontario.

But for all its strengths, there is one glaringly obvious elephant in the room amidst my laudatory treatment of Freetown cuisine: variety. There is none. If you're staying in Freetown for three months or less, it's very easy to enjoy Salone food. But beyond that, it starts to get stale pretty quickly. Cassava, groundnut, jollof, repeat. That's a lot of rice. If you're living in the provinces, I imagine the period before ennui sets in is halved.

The lack of choice extends even to the beverage market. My consumption of pop has skyrocketed in Salone, after I had nearly excised it from my diet with an atypically effective New Year's resolution back in '07. Other options are sorely lacking.

Even this carbonated playing field is sparsely populated. Coke rules the thirst-quenching arena as an undisputed champion, Sprite and Fanta (so far I've tried orange, strawberry, grape, lemon, apple, pineapple, tropical cocktail and cider - refer to list-completion neurosis alluded to earlier) serving as faithful underlings in the land Pepsi products forgot about (at the peril of their global profit margins, I might add).

The fact these beverages are still served in those badass, old-school glass bottles is a hollow consolation most days (though, let's be honest, some days I get pretty amped up about it).

Though I have no solutions for the beverage boredom, I've been casting my lot with the Lebanese in recent weeks, attempting to enliven my diet with the shawarmas, kous kous, makanek and hommous of places like Downtown and the uninspired yet temptingly close Basha Bakery.

Mostly, though, I've found myself dreaming ever more salaciously of a Canadian culinary coming home, haunted by visions of the Ethel's chorizo flambado, Subway's chicken and bacon ranch, Currie's curry, homemade fajitas and fettucini alfredo, and of course Bonnie Brown's world famous chocolate chip cookies.

Ah yes. This is what homesickness tastes like.