Showing posts with label African Food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label African Food. Show all posts

Monday, April 18, 2011

Aicha Restaurant: A Senegalese Oasis in Crown Heights

Amid the frenzy of Caribbean restaurants along the Bed Stuy/Crown Heights divide cutting across Nostrand Avenue, a new Senegalese restaurant recently opened in a failed jerk spot just south of Atlantic Avenue. I'm not going to pretend to know anything about Senegalese food (I don't blame you if you stop reading now), but Aicha Restaurant (pronounced "Aisha") is worth checking out for anyone looking for something different.


Senegal is in West Africa. That's as far as I read in the Wikipedia article (I kid-- I did do some actual research for this post, as you'll soon see). In NYC there's a small but noticeable Senegalese community stretching from Bed Stuy to Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, and a few Senegalese restaurants can be found as one heads down Fulton Street towards downtown Brooklyn.

Aicha is halal, so pork lovers should avoid (not really). While they also advertise "American cuisine," there's very little of it to be found. Instead, most of the dishes (I'll avoid calling them curries, but that's what they look like to me) contain beef or chicken and a bit of fish. Almost everything contains guedge (pronounced "gedge"), which is a musty, heavily fermented dried fish and a key ingredient in the coastal Wolof cuisine that predominates in the city's Senegalese restaurants. Although Senegal was a French colony, not much of what I tried seemed to have a French influence (beyond some of the dish names).