Eating In Translation

Cuchifritos

Cod is the namesake of the bacalaito, whose oily texture owes nothing to omega-3s. It's delicious for that very reason. The appearance of this Puerto Rican fritura is very variable; depending on who's been working the fry station, you might be handed a half-moon, a disk, or some more irregular form. Rarely will it be this wrinkled.

Also shown: the tail end of a pionono de carne, a fritura of mashed plantain filled with a picadillo of ground meat and, by the texture and taste of it, more plaintain. Elsewhere in town it might be branded as a rellena amarilla, which literally means nothing more than "a filled yellow one."

Cuchifritos
168 East 116th St. (Lexington-Third Aves.), Manhattan
212-876-4846
www.Instagram.com/explore/locations/243826445/Cuchifritos-116-Puerto-Rican-Food-New-York-NY

Morning coffee and donut cart

A sugar donut — nothing special, just the right one-dollar donut at the right time.

Morning coffee and donut cart
East 124th St. near the northwest corner with Park Ave., Manhattan
Possibly weekdays only

BF Soul Food Restaurant

(As of 2023 this establishment has been renamed Okis, but nothing else seems to have changed.) When cut open, the candied centerpiece of my meal, surrounded by collard greens, black-eyed peas, and ham, didn't reveal the uniform color and texture I expected. Still good, just different. At this new East Harlem buffet, whose owners come from Burkina Faso, yam means yam.

Also shown: the roofline, bearing the legend "Pythian Hall." Evidently the building was designed for The Knights of Pythias and completed in 1891, but the fraternal organization doesn't seem to have met here in ages.

BF Soul Food Restaurant
54 East 125th St. (Park-Madison Aves.), Manhattan
646-964-5440

Sisters Cuisine

At this Caribbean café in East Harlem, curry chicken (above, with callaloo plus rice and beans) is prepared in the Guyanese bunjal style. Cooked down till it clings, this is no "dry curry." For a recent breakfast of sautéed codfish and boiled provisions, or root vegetables (below), the cassava was particularly creamy. A freshly griddled roti (bottom) was wrapped around curry goat — as with many Caribbean goat dishes, beware the occasional bone — with potato and chickpeas. My plate also sported sweet potato and callaloo, which in this rendition was sparing with okra, brightened by spinach.

I enjoyed that roti during research for my first article in The New York Times, "Grab a Bite If You Don't Have to Run," a guide to 26.2 places to eat along the route of the 2008 New York City Marathon. To evoke the diversity of marathon competitors, each entry offered the cuisine of a different country; the "point-two" was for a relative novelty at the time, a food truck. In the dozen years since publication, the interactive map and my photos have been withdrawn from the newspaper's online archive; alas, a dozen or so of the venues have vanished, too.

Sisters Cuisine
47 East 124th St. (Madison-Park Aves.), Manhattan
212-410-3000
www.SistersCuisineHarlem.com

F.W. Woolworth & Co.

Site of a lunch counter, too? For pointing me this way, thanks to the Facebook group Ghost Signs.

F.W. Woolworth & Co.
Surviving signage, 2226 Third Ave. (at East 121st St.), Manhattan

"Blue canopy" Mexican stand

Who was I kidding, asking for lettuce? My quesadilla de chicharrón was overloaded with what I really wanted: supple squares of fried pork skin.

"Blue canopy" Mexican stand
East side of Third Ave. between 117th and 118th Sts., Manhattan

Hole in the Wall

Rice with squid — arroz con calamares en su tinta, "in its own ink," which colors the rice — is a Friday special at this Dominican lunch counter. Hole in the Wall sits just above a subway entrance at 116 and Lex; indeed, last I looked, the principal signage still reads "Lexington Restaurant, Comida Criolla." Also shown below, immediately across the avenue: an old mass-transit-themed ad, "All cars transfer to Bloomingdale's."

Hole in the Wall
1863 Lexington Ave. (115th-116th Sts.), Manhattan
646-858-1101

Fruit at the Barrio Fridge

A crochet collaboration of NaomiRag (Naomi Lawrence) and MakeMoreFresh (Chelsea Wagner), 2020
East 108th St. between First and Second Aves., displayed beside a "female-powered free community fridge providing fresh food to East Harlem" (shown below)
www.Facebook.com/TheBarrioFridge

Tetela vendor

The signs said tlacoyos, but the hand-drawn triangle signaled their smaller cousins, tetelas. Mine was filled with bean; early in the day, beneath the embroidered liner of this lady's handcart, I might have found chicken-filled tetelas, too.

Tetela vendor
Handcart on East 116th St. near the southeast corner with Third Ave., Manhattan

Cross Culture Kitchen

Maggi is salty. Whether in a bottle on the condiment caddy or in a foil wrap at the edge of the plate, it offers a potent dose of sodium to many West African dishes. Not that Maggi is an African brand; the original was developed by one Julius Maggi in Switzerland, in 1863; today, under the Nestlé umbrella, Maggi products are distributed around the world.

"The original African Maggi," as the restaurant manager called it, is much less overbearing. That pale brown granular substance atop my lafidi (Lah-fee-dee, aka fouti) — a rice plate also presented with a dollop of okra sauce and the familiar, fearsome chile pepper, and laced throughout with palm oil — supplied a textural change of pace and a certain piquancy without excessive saltiness. Its source is the néré, a locust bean tree whose seeds are cooked, fermented, and in many cases dried and pulverized. Of its many names in various West African languages, soumbala might be the most familiar. Another key to the excellence of this deceptively simple-looking dish was the very-well-fluffed rice itself.

Cross Culture Kitchen is the transplanted, rebranded incarnation of Salimata. Late in 2013, that restaurant and the neighboring storefront mosque were shuffled off from the gentrifying stretch of lower Frederick Douglass Blvd.; in early 2020, the now vacant lot has yet to be developed.

Also shown, from a recent visit: cassava leaf with beef, one of three Guinean sauces available that day; the view from my dining area, six blocks south.

Cross Culture Kitchen
62 East 116th St. (Park-Madison Aves.), Manhattan
212-860-3900