ADAM: The World Cup has put South Africa in the spotlight for everyone who cares about soccer. And Americans too! So in preparation for Sunday’s championship game, we went to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and gorged at Madiba, New York’s most festive purveyor of South African cuisine. (We learned about Madiba at a soccer event hosted by the South African wine, Nederburg. Thanks, Nederburg!) As luck would have it, we got to Madiba right after last week’s Ghana-Uruguay game, so the place was overflowing with African soccer fans, who were still partying even though they lost. That means we got to hear annoying horn noises in person!

LAURA: We kicked off our meal with Bunny Chow, which, like monkey gland sauce and Sugar Babies, sadly does not contain the mammal after which its named. “Curry in a Bread Bowl” would have been a more apropos moniker, since that’s what it is: a scooped-out loaf filled to the brim with curried stew. It’s a popular street food in South Africa and originated in the 1940s, when apartheid laws kept black people from eating in restaurants. To keep business from tanking, Indian restaurant owners, or banias, slung their curries into hunks of bread (instead of bowls) and sold the dish out their windows, creating a very early version of take-out food with edible doggie bags.
 
ADAM: And that’s how Bunny Chow proved racism creates great things! What a history lesson. Next we gulped down a rich oxtail potjiekos, aka stew, sucking the soft beef off the tail bones. Potjiekos (pronouced poi-kei-kos) literally translates into “pot food” and is the name for any stew cooked in a—yup—potjie. The potjies are three-legged cast iron kettles that range in size from Adorable (fits in your palm) to Holy Crap (gives you a hernia). They were originally used by wagon-train-traveling Afrikaans settlers, who never bothered to clean out the pots. Instead they’d leave in all leftover stew, then simply toss in more ingredients before every meal to replenish what had been eaten the night before. We sincerely hope that’s not how potjiekos is made at Madiba.

LAURA: A braai (pronounced bry ) is a South African barbecue with customs similar to what we see here in the States. (Families do it on weekends and holidays; men helm the grill, women make the sides; Father’s Day cards make cliched jokes about it.) For our braai experience, we tried boerewors (above), a beef sausage with Dutch heritage that’s formed into a glorious spiral and tossed on the braai until the casing crisps up. It was served with a mild cornmeal porridge called pap (think grits, but thicker), which is the go-to side for all meats (“vleis”) ‘round these parts.
 
ADAM: How much do South Africans love their pap and vleis? Well, a local radio station recently created a song parody called “Pap En Vleis.” It was set to the tune of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” Obviously. Check out an delightfully weird, choreographed, costumed performance below. We’re fairly certain this is what they do for half-time entertainment at every World Cup game. South Africa is awesome!
 

Eats Deets
Madiba Restaurant
195 Dekalb Avenue (Fort Greene, Brooklyn)
(718) 855-9190

Postcard from South Africa

To get our World Cupped, we hit up Brooklyn’s outpost of South Africa, the restaurant Madiba. While there, owner Mark Henegan showed us a potjie (above), the three-legged cast iron pot traditionally used to cook stew. Then he filled us in on the most awesomely alarming South African item on the menu: Monkey Gland Sauce.

“We tell people that we rip out a monkey’s glands then cook them, but that’s not true,” he explained. “No one’s sure where the name monkey gland sauce came from, but one story is that it originated when a big French chef came to Johannesburg. While he wasn’t paying attention, someone put fruit into his red wine reduction. He sipped it and shouted, “What is this?!? Monkey gland sauce?!?” But then he realized he loved it. So they put monkey gland sauce on the menu that night and it got written up in all the newspapers. That’s how monkey gland sauce became famous—it was the mixture of a well-known chef from France and the local people in the kitchen.”

At Madiba, they serve monkey gland sauce on ribs. Had it been made of real monkeys, we totally would have gunned it. Instead we opted for an even better main course. One made of bunnies! (Kinda.) Full post on the South African foods we actually ate coming later this week…

Yours in Mastication,
Laura & Adam

It’s National Deep Throat A Hot Dog Day! And in honor of it, here’s a photo of me standing behind Joey Chestnut after he won the 2009 Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Competition by mowing a record-breaking 68 dogs. For two years, I proudly served as Chestnut’s “Bunnette,” the girl who counts hot dogs, roots for the eaters and entertains the crowd. In a nutshell, I was a competitive-eating cheerleader.

Sharing a stage with professional gluttons and being sprayed with wiener shrapnel may not sound like an accomplishment to most, but for me, it was a dream come true. I had always aspired to become a competitive eater until an overzealous bite of a hot dog nearly left me dead and certainly left me fearful of chewing massive amounts of meat at a rapid rate. All of my gorging dreams, dashed.

But this is America, the land of opportunity. It’s where hot dogs were invented, where competitive eating is considered a sport and, of course, where dreams are made. And even though I wasn’t shoveling hot dogs into my maw, I was still a part of the greatest eating competition in the world — without having to deal with post-match meat sweats.

So thanks for making my dreams come true, America. Happy Independence Day…and go Chestnut!

Sorry it’s been so long since our last post; we took some time to learn better video editing software. (Piss off, iMovie!) But now we’re back with thoughts and video from the Ukraine, NYC! View on to learn about Borscht, meat Jell-O and monuments built to boiled things.

LAURA: As they say in the Ukraine, “[Unpronounceable word]!”, which means “Welcome, please sit down and stuff your face!” And that is exactly what we did at the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant. Watch our video to see us chow ‘n chat about borscht, varenyky and studenetz, a pork-filled gelatin that would make even Bill Cosby sing, “J-E-L-L-Oh, hell no!” But first, allow us to drop a bit of Ukrainian knowledge on you.

ADAM: Extending an internationally upraised middle finger to Dr. Atkins, Ukrainians eat bread with every meal. Thus our food was prefaced with some amazing, freshly baked challah and rye. The Ukraine has long been known as the Breadbasket of Europe because their farmlands pop up so much grain it’s like God secretly replaced their usual soil with a country-sized mat of Miracle Grow. Despite being smaller than the state of Texas, the Ukraine formerly churned out 25 percent of the Soviet Union’s entire agricultural output. Their fields are so legendary that Hitler had a plan to eliminate the country’s entire population so he could repopulate the farmlands with Germans. (This might lead one to believe that perhaps Hitler wasn’t a very nice man. Or perhaps he just loved bread.)

LAURA: Speaking of grain-greedy men with bad mustaches, Joesph Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s caused the worst man-made famine in history, resulting in 10 million Ukrainian deaths and a lot of hangry* people. So no wonder the Ukes go gangbusters on bread today—they EARNED that carb bloat. If you wanna feel extra guilty about going back for thirds at Old Country Buffet, check out the Harvard Interview Refugee Project. Type “Ukraine” and “famine” into the search bar to read heart-wrenching stories of starvation, including at least one account of cannibalism that somehow made our meat jello seem not so bad:

“I was at a bazaar called the Besarabian market. I saw a woman open a valise and put her goods out for sale. Her goods consisted of jellied meat, which she sold at 50 rubles a portion. I saw a man come over to her — a man who bore all the marks of starvation — he bought himself a portion and began eating. As he ate of his portion, he noticed that a human finger was embedded in the jelly. He began shouting at the woman and began yelling at the top of his voice. People came running, gathered around her, and then seeing what her food consisted of, took her to the police. At the militia, two members of the NKVD went over to her and, instead of taking action against her, they burst out laughing. ‘What, what you killed a kulak [a wealthy peasant]? Good for you!’ And then they let her go.’”

ADAM: The most amazing thing I learned about the Ukraine was this: My grandmother was actually born there. I didn’t learn that until I was talking to my dad after our meal. As I was growing up, my grandma used to say simply that she was from Russia—which was the case back then because the Ukraine was part of the USSR—but it turns out she was specifically from Dnipropetrovsk, the Ukraine’s third largest city. She snuck out to the US with her mother after the Russian Revolution. The revelation makes me feel like a complete ass. Here we are on a quest to learn about the countries of the world from strangers in New York, and I never took the time to learn about my own grandmother’s homeland directly from her while she was still alive. So I’d like to put out this request: Dear Internet, If anyone out there happens to be from the area around Dnipropetrovsk, and you wouldn’t mind taking some time to tell me more about it, please reblog or get in touch at navigeaters@gmail.com. As a thanks, I promise to send you some bread.

* When you’re so hungry, you’re angry.

Eats Deets
Ukrainian East Village Restaurant
140 Second Ave. (East Village)
(212) 529-5024

Our post on eating Cuy—the guinea pigs cooked up as food in Ecuador—just got this comment from “Aamzy” in Peru. We have no idea if it’s actually true, but we want it to be:

“You have to be very careful, because sometimes rats rape cuys and a sort of hybrid is born (like a cuy with a tail) and some people cut their tail and cook them anyway, so you may be eating rat!”

Wait, why does it have to be rape, Aamzy? Are you saying a guinea pig would never hump a rat willingly? Call us romantics, but we choose to believe these spit-roasted abominations are the product of star-crossed love…

Detour: North Carolina Barbecue

We were in NC for a wedding this weekend, so we stopped Navigeating long enough to get porked. This plate is from the legendary BBQ hole-in-the-wall Allen & Son, outside Chapel Hill. You’re looking at hush puppies, coleslaw, Brunswick Stew and some of the tastiest chopped barbecue North Carolina has to offer. While many NC BBQ joints have switched to gas, pit master Keith Allen gets up at 3 am every morning to kick it old school: cooking whole hogs over hickory coals. The split swine roasts low and slow for eight to twelve hours, the drippings falling to the coals then sizzling awesomeness right back up into the meat. When done, the pig is picked apart, minced together and dressed in an Eastern NC vinegar sauce. 

From the outside, Allen & Son looks like a rundown shack, which fits our general rule of thumb when it comes to choosing what BBQ restaurants to hit: The crappier the sign, the tastier the swine.

NC BBQ Flickr photoset

ADAM: Malaysia wants you to know that its food is awesome. To that end, their government has recently launched a publicity campaign aimed at getting New Yorkers to think of going out for Malaysian just like they would think of going out for Chinese or Indian or Thai or whatever nationality it is they claim to be at P.F. Chang’s. So in a Navigeatin’ first, a country actually offered to take us out to dinner. We agreed to let Malaysia pay for the date, but swore there would be no untoward hanky panky, because we are ladies.

LAURA: Speak for yourself, Winer. I totally banged Malaysia. And it all went down at Laut, where we were mentored by professional wino Michael Green and had plate after plate piled upon us by chef and owner Kathy Wong. She explained that Malaysian cuisine is a multicultural mishmash of native Malay dishes with Chinese, Indian, Thai and even some Portuguese and Middle Eastern influences. That’s what happens when your nation is right on the Eastern Spice Trade Route and everyone wants a piece of the hot property.

ADAM: Our first dish, Roti Canai, showed how Malaysia got its Indian on. This flatbread is lighter, daintier and, dare I say, awesomer then the roti you’d eat in India. Kathy actually took us into the kitchen so we could watch her chef use four flicks of his wrists to flip a lump of dough into tissue paper thinness. (Progression of pics here, here, here and here.) The dough is then grilled and served with a curry sauce, the bite of which is nicely tempered with sweet coconut milk.

LAURA: We also got a taste of red snapper seasoned with belacan, a signature Malay ingredient made of fermented ground shrimp that’s been salt-cured, sun-dried and formed into a block of paste. Although uncooked belacan looks like a bar of chocolate, it smells like a post-game jock strap and is meant to be used sparingly. Cooking it kills the stench and the bacteria (raw paste is not meant for consumption), and just a dab adds a lot of texture and taste.

ADAM: Most Malaysian meals include some sort of Nasi, aka rice. The fish came with Nasi Lemak, which is rice that’s soaked in coconut milk before being steamed. Nasi Lemak is sweet and delicious and often eaten for breakfast. In contrast, our next plate featured a scoop of Nasi Goreng, fried rice that’s complexly spiced. It came paired with some wonderfully soft calamari alongside another one of Malaysia’s signature curry dishes, Beef Rendang (whole plate pictured below). Kathy told us it took her about two hours to prepare Beef Rendang because of all the spicing and cooking it required. Meanwhile, it only took us about 30 seconds to eat it. (We win!)

LAURA: We finished off our meal with black sticky rice and a tea-pulling ceremony, in which a showboat mixes tea with condensed milk and pours it in ridiculously long streams from one pitcher to another. Imagine Tom Cruise’s character in Cocktail without the booze (or suicide or Gina Gershon). Teh tarik, as it’s called, is so popular in Malaysia, they even do it in fast-food joints and hold competitions. 

ADAM: Yeah, watching that tea-pulling had me giddy. Thanks for a great date, Malaysia! We’d have slipped your whole country some tongue at the end, but after all that eating, our mouths were tired.

Eats Deets
Laut
15 East 17th Street (Flatiron)
(212) 206-8989

Postcard from Malaysia

We saw a super-impressive demonstration of teh tarik (aka pulled tea) at Union Square’s Laut. Condensed milk is mixed into the tea by long-pouring everything from bucket to bucket. The most amazing part: That tea is flowing from the bottom bucket up to the top one!

(Disclaimer: No, it’s not.)

Full review of what we learned about Malaysian cuisine coming later this week. And if you like our site, please recommend Navigeaters as a Tumblr food blog.

Yours in mastication,
Laura and Adam

El Salvador via Woodside, Queens: This Meal Tastes Like Pupusa

ADAM: El Salvador is the smallest country in Central America, taking up roughly the same amount of space as New Jersey. That being said, all the dishes we ate from El Salvador were better than every single thing that has ever come out of New Jersey ever. With the possible exception of Bon Jovi. For our gorging, we headed to the restaurant Izalco, which takes its name from El Salvador’s super-awesome volcano that—fun fact!—erupted almost continuously from 1770 to 1966.

LAURA: We were waited on by the owner’s son and chef José, who recommended that we start with some traditional Salvadoran drinks, Marañón juice and Horchata. Marañón, known as the cashew apple, hangs off the nut like some kind of parasitic twin. But a parasitic twin that you’d happily gnaw off—it tasted like a less acidic version of pineapple. Horchata is a finely blended beverage of rice, peanuts and spices. The first sip hit me with a strong peanut punch, but the aftertaste was more reminiscent of milk that had been seaped in Cinamon Toast Crunch cereal.

ADAM: We appetized on a hearty sopa de pata, aka cow foot soup. It came overflowing with yuca, plantains, tripe, corn-still-on-the-cob and, of course, cow piggies. The feet meat (served still clinging to the bone) was pretty fatty but surprisingly downable. Really, the weirdest part was the soft plantains. Think of slurping a beef broth then running into a cooked banana. It wasn’t bad, just not something I’d personally do with my Chiquitas.

LAURA: The stars of our dinner were the pupusas, corn tortillas stuffed with pork cracklings and cheese. They’re the country’s best-known dish, created centuries ago by El Salvador’s indigenous Pipiles Indians—and don’t let a pupusa-selling Honduran tell you otherwise. So how do you stuff a pancake? According to Jose, you roll the dough into a ball, finger a hole in the middle to stuff with goodness, then flatten it out on the griddle. Sounds like a prime candidate for some kind of as-seen-on-TV gadget. Pupusa Puff, anyone?

ADAM: We also got all up on the seafood tip with shark ceviche and fried yuca with fried pescaditos. Pescaditos are a salty, sardiny-type fish that turn out to be fun to pop into your mouth whole. As for the ceviche, New York’s meddlesome Health Department doesn’t let restaurants serve true, raw shark, so the fish was cooked (booo!) making it a touch chewy. It tastes basically like most other firm white fish—think swordfish—but by eating the shark bits we did reap vengeance for all those humans killed in Jaws 1 through Jaws 3D.

LAURA: We ended our meal with atol de elote, something you’d order, say, if you were thirsty for corn. It’s a thick, warm drink made of finely ground kernels, sugar and milk. If you believe superstition, making it involves complicated stirring rituals—that’s right, stirring rituals. For starters, if you are in a bad mood, DON’T STIR IT! Salvadorans believe this will lead to bad-tasting atol de elote. Ditto if you’re pregnant. That’s why Adam wasn’t allowed to stir it. (You can never be too safe.)

ADAM: Ever since 2001, the U.S. dollar has been the official currency of El Salvador which, for international banking reasons, retired its earlier denomination, the colon. (Named after the upper part of Laura’s rectum.) Thus, after we finished eating at Izalco, we paid our bill in the El Salvador’s official currency. We’re so authentic!

Eats Deets
Izalco
64-05 Roosevelt Ave (Woodside, Queens)
(718) 533-8373