I’ve often left restaurants with a to-go box filled with something too filling to finish in one sitting but too delicious to leave behind. Last night was the first time I’ve left a restaurant with a raw specimen of the main ingredient of a dish I’d ordered, and instructions on how to prepare it. But this gift was only one of the many delights that comprised my dinner at Kombit, a Haitian restaurant in Prospect Heights.
Kombit is just a few doors down from my apartment, and for months I’d been passing it and occasionally stopping to look at the menu to attempt pronunciation of the exotic Creole names, and to ponder ways to fit the Lambi (conch simmered in tomato) or Goat Tasso (fried chunks of marinated goat meat) into my starving-student budget. So when it came to choosing a place for a family dinner after my college graduation – it needed to be a place I had wanted to try out for a while, but one that was representative of the neighborhood and something that my parents (maybe) wouldn’t find at home in Berkeley – Kombit was the logical answer.
While waiting for our parents who were lagging behind, my sister and I decided to order drinks. Kombit has an impressive list of cocktails, but I chose a glass of Malta, a Carribean soda made of barley, hops, and water. I had heard it tasted like beer (which makes sense given the ingredients), but it reminded me of the instant Horlicks my mother used to make, with the creaminess of milk replaced by the refreshing zing of carbonation. My sister ordered Jus Corosol, made from the soursop fruit, which despite its name, as a waiter pointed out to us, is far from sour. It has a mildly sweet taste that seems to combine pineapple, guava, banana – basically every tropical fruit you can think of.
When it came to ordering, our waitress ascertained our unfamiliarity with the Haitian cuisine pretty quickly, and helpfully started constructing a meal for us according to our preferences. One question had to be answered first: “Are you hungry, or hungry-hungry?” Based on our responses, and taking my sister’s vegetarianism into account, we decided to start with Fritai Lakai (assorted fried root vegetables, including plantains and sweet potatoes), Akra, a traditional appetizer made of yautia, a staple root vegetable in West Indian cuisine, which is pureed and fried to resemble something like large tater tots. It is served with a spicy cabbage slaw whose freshness perfectly balances the decadent satisfaction of perfectly crisp-fried root vegetable.
The more we munched on the fritters, however, the more we wondered about the nature of the particular vegetable that composed them. The menu mentioned that yautia is also called “edo” on some islands in the West Indies, but neither name sounded familiar. We eventually asked our waitress if she could describe the vegetable, but she had a better plan: she reappeared from the kitchen a few moments later with a raw, unscrubbed yautia tuber rolling around on a small plate. She explained the tedious process of removing the tiny hairs that sprout from its thin dark brown skin, and how to make the white flesh into a pulp in a food processor. It sounded like quite an undertaking. “We like to say that a lot of love goes into Haitian cooking,” she said, “but it’s a lot of work.”
The tuber was placed off to the side when our main dishes arrived: Legume San Viand (stewed vegetables with rice and beans), Legume Bef (vegetables with beef, rice, and beans) and Rara salad (beets, corn, and other vegetables in a creamy dressing). Once again our waitress was on hand to demonstrate the best way to eat rice and beans: make a flat bead of rice on your plate, scoop some stewed vegetables on top, and spoon bean puree over the whole thing. Make sure to get some of each component on each forkful. This is an excellent method in my book, but the stew was delicious on its own, too – its subtle spice and the way the flavors of the cabbage, carrots, and lima beans had melted together was obviously a product of slow and laborious Haitian-style cooking.
As we left the restaurant, I was ready to book a flight to any tropical country where I could sip Jus Corosol and enjoy a slower pace of life, and of course the effects this has on cooking. But knowing that this was probably not going to happen, I was comforted by the bag in my hand, full of leftover plantains and the raw yautia, waiting to be cooked with the container of spice mix that our waitress had generously included. Plus, while the West Indies are a little far, Kombit is still down the street, and I have to go back to try the Goat Tasso.
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