Spoonlickers

If the British broadsheets are to be believed, a truly relaxing weekend should involve handing over enormous amounts of money in exchange for a stay at some beige hotel close to a major road where you will be subject to any number of dubious 'spa treatments'. I love a massage as much as anyone, but I can't seem to get excited about making it the focus of a weekend.

The Collines de Niassam lodge in Palmarin is more my style. Here you can relax without having to apply slices of cucumber and listen to new age forest dolphin music in a room smelling of pot pourri. There is nothing to do at Collines de Niassam. You are a bumpy drive away from the nearest anything, so all that is left is to indulge in a bit of sunbathing, perhaps have a pootle around the lagoon in a canoe or, for the more energetic, a spot of birdwatching among the baobabs. You can choose a hut suspended over the lagoon, or perhaps a pokey little treehouse. There are no TV's, radios or car rapides at Collines de Niassam, just fresh air, fresh food, and a fresh breeze.

The staff lay on three meals a day, each using ingredients sourced locally. This is not for any high-minded eco-friendly middle-class crusading reason, but out of practicality. Making the trip to the city, and preserving imported chilled or frozen goods would just be too much of a hassle. When you run exerything off solar power and scrapyard assembled wind turbines, you have to make sure every joule of energy is spent wisely.

Bread and Jam for breakfast was a bit tight. It was nice bread, and great jam, but it was the same nice bread and great jam every day. Any chance of a boiled egg? Things perked up at lunch and dinner time though (there, I've done it, used the words 'lunch and dinner' instead of 'dinner and tea'. It's a slippery slope.), when more substantial meals are presented to us - crisp salads, smoked fish, smooth desserts, and healthy measures of home made fruit-flavoured rum to wash it all down with.

One night we kick off with boulettes of zebu on cabbage.


These get the ball rolling for a number of jokes ("I didn't know Zebu's had three balls" etc etc).

Curried monkfish with taglietelle comes next:


We'll overlook the pasta for a moment (this is a weird francophone thing, serving pasta with curry. Perhaps they just think it's all 'Orientale' and therefore the same thing), and focus on the meaty chunks of monkfish, one of my favourite fishes for throwing in a curry (expensive in the UK, but ten a penny round these parts). While the curry itself was mild, it didn't suffer the usual Senegalese fate of being loaded with jumbo stock cubes. It tasted clear and sharp, and let the subtle (some might say bland) flavour of the fish speak for itself.

But my word, they just knock you out with dessert:


A whipped, creamy chocolate ganache with alternating layers of white and dark chocolate. Richer than Roman Abramovitch and thicker than Wayne Rooney. This one even beat Mrs Jiffler, and left us with our eyes rolling in our heads in need of a stiff glass of rum to sort us out.

I tried to pop my head in the kitchen for a nosey around and to give my congratulations, but was chased away by laughing ladies. Perhaps I caught them licking the chocolate off their spoons.

Lodge des Collines de Niassam
Palmarin Ngallou, BP 08 JOAL - Sénégal
Tel: 77 639 06 39
resa@niassam.com
http://www.niassam.com

Les Huitres

How to eat oysters:


Freshly picked from the mangrove, gently smoked, and then guzzled with fingers on a beach in Senegal's Sine Saloum delta.

How not to pick oysters:


For mangrove conservation reasons, it is forbidden for oyster collectors to cut mangroves in order to collect their bounty. The people who collect oysters are almost always women, who wade out chin deep into the creeks, and must use sharp knives to cut the oysters from the mangroves. It takes longer this way, but it means that there will be mangroves, and oysters, for tomorrow.

Our guide explained this to us. Then he and the boatman drew our pirogue up to the mangroves, and promptly uprooted a couple of branches. Apparently it's OK to destroy the habitat if you have a boatload of white people and are in a hurry...

Mangroves are an important habitat for a number of species, including humans. So, if you go to the Sine Saloum delta and see the guides tearing up the mangroves, let them know.

For more on mangroves visit Wetlands International.

Catching up

You wouldn't believe the backblog. I've just been away, eating as always, so things are starting to pile up. Here are some bits and bobs, just to clear the decks.

Moules a la Popenguine.
Fine dining is, er, fine, but you can't beat a bit of improvised big fisted cooking. A recent visit to Popenguine with friends required exactly that.

An itinerant fish saleswoman delivered on her promise of a sack full of fresh mussels from the Somone estuary, and we set to work rinsing and scraping off the beards. To hell with the barnacles. These were artisanal moules.

A few minutes in a pan with a couple of bottles of beer (one for me, one for the mussels) et voila:


How did that crab claw get in there?

Lobster a la Ngor
Once again, some friends, a beach, some seafood. This time a (slightly burnt) rock lobster:


And before anybody asks another time why you can't eat the gills ("Dead man's fingers") they are not poisonous apparently, but are tough, taste horrible, are indigestable, and according to Jiffler senior "might give you the shits if you're really unlucky".

Steak Jiffleur
Look, I've got a new camera OK. I'm just getting to grips with food photography. A faux tournedos steak with tomatoes cooked in balsmaic vinegar:

The Mountain in Labour

Cozy, Rue Parent, Plateau.

Visiting Cozy reminded me of going to see Star Wars Episode I (The Phantom Menace) on the day of release in the summer of 1999. we were a bunch of lads in our twenties - old enough to have obsessed over the original trilogy as boys - who'd taken the day off from whatever we were doing to pile into an airconditioned box in the midlands, knees jiggling with the excitement.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... and the heroic, Wagner-esque John Williams theme tune starts up. A head rush of excitement. Five grown men grinning like fools...

But it turned out to be a load of old bollocks.

Cozy, one of Dakar's so called 'fine dining' restaurants aims to impress from the moment you step through the door. Smart staff welcome you to a long, stylish, well stocked bar. The first impression is that somebody has spent some serious money on this place, and it would only be right to spend some serious money on some serious food. The main eating area features oversized chairs and white downlit floor to ceiling curtains which impress at first but, like the CGI effects in the Phantom Menace, end up looking like a cheap interior design. Maximum style for minimum cost.

I'm not sure why the Maitre d' attempted to sit all of the females in our mixed party along one side of the table, with all the boys lined up along the other side. Perhaps he was thinking les anglophones might want to start morris dancing at some point during the meal. we ignored him in any case, but Cozy continued to reinforce the sexist agenda by handing out menus without prices on to the ladies (all of whom were the principal earners in Dakar, the rest of us being 'trailing spouses'). I've seen this kind of disgustingly chauvanistic behaviour in France before, and I'm not sure, in this day and age, what kind of woman is impressed by this, and what kind of pathetic man thinks it's impressive.

One of the challenges for the producers of the Phantom Menace was how to keep the old audience of grown ups interested, while also hooking into the new toy-hungry market of 7 year old boys. What we ended up with was a confusing mish mash of tedious politics and a 'comedy' animated jester. I think Cozy faces the same problem with its mix of pasta, risotto, sushi and French cuisine on the menu. Surely it's wiser to play to your strengths? Just give us some spectacular interstellar dogfights, and maybe a wookie, and we'll love it.

Most of us skip the overpriced starters, and roam the four corners of the earth with our main courses. While service is mostly quick, one of our mains gets forgotten in the kitchen, and there is that terrible habit of topping up the wine, which extended to topping up my water glass with white. They fail the jiffler fish-knife test by surreptitiously swapping my tableknife for a pointless fishknife. Too blunt to stab a waiter in the leg unfortunately.

They should have given me a steak knife, such was the toughness of my overcooked, undersized planche of turbot. Pommes sautes are rubbery, and the accompanying 'paste' of avocado and hibiscus leaves tastes of nothing. Like a mouthful of emptiness. The others seem moderately pleased with their various gnocci and sushi plates, but nobody gets out of their seat to rave about anything. Half of Mrs Jiffler's sashimi selection is appropriately robust and fishy, while the salmon tastes like my avocado paste.

The only thing you can rely on at these upmarket joints in Dakar are the desserts. Sticking firmly in the French style, desserts come in large portions, with all the creative swirls and splats that you could wish for. Cozy passes the Jiffler creme brulee test with flying colours, presenting three separate flavours (vanilla, pistachio and bergamot) in three cups, complete with dipping biscuit and an appropriately unnecessary frizz of thick pink candy floss hovering on the plate like a psychedelic barbed wire fence.

To finish, Nescafe, barmen with highly gelled coiffs spinning glasses, and badly dressed Toubabs clapping like seals to bad techno. More village of the Ewoks than attack on the Death Star.

Like the Phantom Menace, its easy to switch off the quality control and sit through an enjoyable meal, with enjoyable company. But with expectations set high, I left with a sense of disappointment. Right now the best and most consistent cooking in Dakar is coming from the upper-mid-range places - New Africa, Farid, Jardin Thailandais, for example,while the likes of Cozy seem to get by simply by charging high prices and having a shiny bar.

There is more from Dakar at Dakar Restaurant Reviews. Next post I'll be back in Asia.

Dakar Restaurant Reviews

Dakar Restaurant Reviews is now online.

The first post features a few of my local eateries, all within staggering distance of the new Chez Jiffler in Point E. There is more to come though - with posts on Plateau, Yoff-Ngor-Almadies, cafes and patisseries, Goree Island, St Louis and Saly coming soon.