Nigerian Food Review

Spoiler: I survived

In the last newsletter I bravely asked for input as to what you wanted me to eat during my Nigerian food outing.

Cathy said, “I will be nice and not choose snails or goat! How about the plantain beignets (plantains are big in Puerto Rico) and perhaps the peanut stew??!! That sounds kinda yummy!” - Thank you, Cathy, I should’ve taken your kind words more seriously. We did try the goat. More on that later.

Leslie, a reader who has been to Nigeria, wrote in an email, “Don’t know what to tell you about Nigerian food as I thought I was going to die or have a heart attack or both when I ate their fish soup and some other soup/stew….Fueling the sun felt like an understatement in my body. I opted for chicken the next time and there were so many bone fragments from the machete butcher that I also thought it might be the end for me.” Well, Leslie, read on. I felt your words to the core and also felt a lot of bone fragments.

My friend Katie said she couldn’t wait to see what I choose. My feelings couldn’t have been more opposite. Eating is so intimate. You are putting things in your body for better and for worse, which is why I put it off going to do this day-in-the-life activity for most of the month. This is also why my camp friend, Holly replied, “hope you have your dewormer pills ready,” when I told her what we ate. (Dewormer pills are a necessity here. Our camp doctor hands them out like tic-tacs.)

Similar to the Lekki Market outing, I sought out a friend to join me. There’s safety in numbers, and, if not safety, at least comradery. Luckily, my camp neighbor Vicky agreed to join.

“Think of craziness, think of Vicky, that’s my slogan,” she replied when I asked if she wanted to go on “a crazy adventure.” I can’t help but wonder at what point in the future Vicky will regret telling me this.

After putting this off several weeks, we finally set off. Myself, from America, and my neighbor, Vicky, from Thailand both went to eat Nigerian food in Nigeria. For a moment, it dawned on me how many cultural mountains we all had to climb to get to here. Culture is like gravity. It's an intangible thing that affects so many tangible things like language, food, clothes, ceremonies, celebrations and so much more. And yet here we were, all trying to meet, learn and understand each other more.

The inside of Nok, the restaurant we went to, was clean and colorful. I was surprised that it was just Vicky and I and maybe one other couple eating there, but maybe it’s more of a dinner spot. They also had an outdoor patio where Vicky and I did a small photo shoot. Shout out to the hostess for kindly agreeing to being our photographer.

When it came to ordering, my goal was to be mildly ambitious. Like there was no chance I was about to eat snails, but I also didn’t come to a Nigerian food restaurant just to find the most familiar thing on the menu. Ultimately, I went with a mojito mocktail for a drink. Vicky and I agreed to split the plantain beignets (for Cathy), goat curry and the egusi stew.

My review is as follows:

Mojito mocktail:

10/10. Super refreshing in the Lagos heat. The herbs come through and it’s not too sweet.

Plantain beignets:

10/10. Light, fluffy and the plantain flavor was delicious. These walked a perfect line between sweet and savory. The dip had a nice spice, without knocking you down onto the ground with heat as I feared. Besides the drink, the beignets were the only thing on the table we finished. Great recommendation, Cathy!

Goat Curry:

3/10. The curry flavor was fine. The goat was better than I expected although it is pretty chewy and weirdly fatty. The problem with this dish was that it had so many bones. And not just big ones that were easy to pick out. It had small confetti sized bones in each bite that you would have to use your fingers to fish for before swallowing, lest you puncture your esophagus and require immediate medical attention which is unlikely to be provided. The fluffy rice on the side was why I gave it a 3 rather than a 1.

Egusi Stew:

1.5/10. Neither Vicky nor I like fish, but nothing in the description on the menu specified this was made with fish, a small detail, I suppose. For future reference egusi is made with fish. Smelly fish.

In addition to the fish, this dish had a ball of pounded yam in it. Pounded yam falls in the middle of the texture continuum between mash potatoes and a ball of playdough. Flavor-wise it’s a bland starch without any salt or butter. From my understanding you're supposed to pinch off pieces of the pounded yam and dip it into the egusi and eat it. None of this was good. Also, the egusi was very spicy, even for Vicky, who is used to a lot of spice in her Thai food.

Cow skin that’s super good for you!

The egusi stew was also peppered with giant gelatinous chunks of what our waiter said was cow skin. I decided I had to at least try a bite and Vicky assured me that my own skin would thank me for this as cow skin has lots of collagen.

The first challenge with the cow skin was just getting a bite onto my fork and into my mouth. Every time I thought I’d secured a piece; it seemed to leap off my fork somewhere else on the bowl or table. After many failed attempts, I was able to secure a piece from the fork into my mouth.

Determined, I tried to chew it, but almost immediately began gagging between the taste or the texture. Vicky cheered me on by chanting, “do it for the collagen! Do it for the collagen!” I couldn’t help but notice, despite her passion, she was not personally doing it for the collagen, which felt suspicious.

Determined to make my skin more youthful and to not be defeated by a piece of cow skin, I pivoted to a different strategy of swallowing the chunk whole with a big swig of water. This was successful. I immediately felt the benefits of all that collagen. This is what I told myself, anyway.

Me with a plantain beignet + a Lekki market necklace!

Later I wrote in my journal., “food tasted horrible, but it was a wonderful experience.” It’s funny how what we focus on can color our experience or change it entirely. I thought the taste of the food would be the most important part of this outing. It turned out, Vicky’s company far outweighed the flavors.