For a Haitian get-together, this spicy pumpkin soup with mixed vegetables started the evening with a colorful kick. Rara, an even more colorful cold salad of beets, corn, bell peppers and onion, was almost sweet by contrast. We also enjoyed akra, herb-flecked light fritters made from grated yautia, a taro-like tuber, and accompanied by piklis, an intensely spicy cabbage-carrot slaw. Chicken wings, prepared creole-style, were typically labor-intensive; fried calamari was undistinguished.
Having scraped syrupy sludge off many a sweet-and-sour fish, I was especially happy with the escovitch red snapper; fried and then topped with onions and peppers, its tender interior still tasted of a vinegar-and-sour-orange marinade. Tassot griot — moist yet crispy marinated goat, shown below with fritters of double-fried plantain — was more tender and less bony than renditions I've chewed on at other restaurants.
Those fritters also served as an excellent platform for legume beef (shown at bottom) and its blend of carrot, zucchini, chayote, tomato, cabbage, and peas. Though also as tender as you'll find, the lambi, or conch, arrived swimming with lima beans in too much tomato sauce. A thinner, peppier sauce bathed the gumbo shrimp; red and green bell peppers, as well as onion, accompanied the okra. Entrees were served with an exceptionally savory mushroom-flavored rice.
Frothy, cinnamon-flavored Haitian coffee was interesting, but perhaps because the kitchen was overwhelmed by our group at this point in the evening, showed up later and less hot than it might have. In truth, unflavored coffee would have paired better with pain patate, a spiced sweet-potato dessert with molasses overtones and a sprinkling of coconut.
Kombit Bar & Restaurant
279 Flatbush Ave. (Prospect Pl.-St. Marks Ave.), Brooklyn
718-399-2000
