(Note: The cafe seems to have changed hands, and the menu apparently now features only soul and Caribbean cuisine.) The housemade hot sauce struck a ancestral chord.
Oxtails, mac 'n' cheese, and most other items on the day of our visit would have been right at home on a Jamaican or soul-food steam table. So would our platter of chicken and shrimp, with steamed cabbage, but a second combo of chicken, smoked turkey, and spinach had an earthier twang, plantains aside.
Hard Hat's owner, raised in Staten Island and acquainted with Caribbean cuisine from an early age, was born in Liberia. Her rotating menu, though small, always makes room for at least one dish, like our spinach-and-meat, from back home: palava sauce, fufu with soup, the Liberian specialty called gee bee. And then there's that hot-pepper sauce, which when applied judiciously imparts West African flavor even to ostensibly New World dishes. Just don't make my mouth-numbing mistake: Calibrate your tolerance with the liquid before you start in on the seeds.
The Hard Hat Cafe (aka International Hard Hat Cafe)
90 Bay St. (at Slosson Terr.), St. George, Staten Island
718-273-4428
