“Africa has been totally misunderstood,” said Doughba Caranda-Martin III, the owner of a tea shop in Harlem. “We have so many complex flavors and delicacies, and I want to investigate all of them.”
Yes, all of them. At Serengeti Kitchen, the restaurant he plans to open on 125th Street in early November, Mr. Caranda-Martin will use vanilla beans from Madagascar and shave fresh South African-grown black truffles when they are in season. He will experiment with traditional fermentation techniques and maybe even persuade New Yorkers to try snails that aren’t gleaming with garlic butter.
Unlike New York’s great Senegalese and Ethiopian restaurants, his restaurant promises a wide culinary scope: It will be African, celebrating a range of contemporary flavors and techniques. But because it would be impossible for a single menu to represent the food cultures of an entire continent, the menu will shift every two months to focus on a different region.
Coastal West Africa is up first, and Mr. Caranda-Martin is already tinkering with the opening menu of goat head stew, lamb shanks braised in palm nut sauce, and a mix of seafood — both fresh and fermented — poached in a bright, spicy broth tingling with West African chiles. He says he plans to serve cassava leaves, the greens of the starchy yuca plant, with tender, slow-cooked goat meat.
“I’m Liberian,” said Mr. Caranda-Martin, 41, who immigrated to the United States in the early 1990s, during the First Liberian Civil War. “But I also have a very strong identity as an African, and that’s why this restaurant is so important for me.”
In the Grand Bassa and Lofa regions of Liberia, Mr. Caranda-Martin’s grandparents operated farms growing coffee, tea and root vegetables, and as a boy he tagged along with them as they traveled from Kenya and Ethiopia to Morocco. He went on to careers as a botanical researcher and as an artist. Four and a half years ago, he opened his tea shop Serengeti Teas and Spices is a narrow salon with the look of a modern apothecary, where customers can try hundreds of teas that Mr. Caranda-Martin has mostly bought himself at auction, some of them mixed at his production site in the Bronx.
Most of the ingredients Mr. Caranda-Martin will use to create the regional flavors at Serengeti Kitchen will come from the United States, but some must be imported. Kittaly, a bitter eggplant variety native to West Africa, has a particular taste that can’t be replicated by anything else, he says. The same goes for the tangy, tropical fruit of the baobab tree. And alligator pepper, the dark, dried seed pods of a West African ginger plant, will be essential for layering heat.
“It’s expensive and superspicy,” Mr. Caranda-Martin said, “but it has so much perfume and character, and a certain taste of home.”
Serengeti Kitchen 22 East 125th Street, November.
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