WE WELCOME YOU WITH LOVE AND PLEASE FEEL AT HOME COOL PENNY is a cheerful Nigerian restaurant
at the southern end of
Inglewood's Market Street district, a storefront across the street from
the big post office, three steps down, with African art on the walls.
CNN blares from the television set mounted in the corner. On weekend
nights, the restaurant fills up fast. The cooking is very, very slow. which means that the egusi stew automatically comes with spinach, the
chicken stew is fortified with tomato, there is dried crawfish ground up
in almost everything, and isi-ewu, the famous Igbo dish of goat's-head
soup, is at least technically on the menu. The customers come from
almost everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, and some of the staff hail from
places such as Kenya and TanzaniaFufu, the doughy starch that makes up a
lot of the bulk at Saaris, comes in many guises here, including garri,
eba and freshly pounded yam, but the basic model — the one you get if
you just ask for fufu — is essentially mashed cassava, a lump of the
stuff the size of a loaf of unbaked bread, that is slightly shiny,
slightly sticky, a little in the direction of Play-Doh. The house
special is a dish of boiled plantains served with spicy greens and a
bony, juicy slab of cod. The delicious bean porridge, made with
long-cooked black-eyed peas, is always the first dish to disappear from
the table |
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