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The Caribbean Sunkissed
NOW the carnival is over it doesn't have to mean goodbye to all things Caribbean till next year. Just down the road, Maida Valewards, from where all the action's been, is a small restaurant (at the corner of Chippenham Road and Elgin Avenue) called, irresistibly, the Caribbean Sunkis- sed Restaurant (286 3741) where you can further your acquaintance of island cuisine.
The paucity of restaurants from the African continent and Caribbean islands is mystifying to me. One would assume there to be a natural demand for them but, from a glance around, it would seem not. It may well be that Caribbean food is really home cooking and, besides, one can quite believe that it might not travel well. I would have thought a prerequisite of island food was the sun. The Caribbean Sunkissed Res- taurant may take its name from the burst of orange rays painted over the window- front, but against the overweening grey- ness outside the sunny cheerfulness doesn't entirely convince.
Inside, the Caribbean motif is main- tained with swirling wall-paintings of exotic fruits, familiar and unfamiliar, and Afro muzak (the night I was there a reggae version of 'I Hear Music and There's No One There' was playing). Otherwise, it's a small, high-ceilinged room such as you might find anywhere in these cramped London houses; it seems to be a restaurant almost incidentally.
What to eat depends on how adventur- ous you intend to be. If you want to get a taste of 'typical' Caribbean cooking, then start with calaloo soup. This has many variants based on a mixture of calaloo, a spinachy leaf vegetable, okra (to give viscosity), salt pork and crab meat. That day it was disappointing — rather watery and faintly-flavoured — though it may be worth taking the risk on it as I have heard good reports of it here at other times. Certainly, consistency is not their strong point. They do a pumpkin soup as well, or there is a salad of sliced French beans, onions and tuna (the Caribbean answer to salade nigoise) or those well-known South Sea specialities, crab cocktail, honeydew melon or Avocado Limbo Dancer otherwise known as avocado with prawns and vinaigrette.
Their fish is far and away the best thing on the menu. Anyway, who could resist Caribbean Deepwater Shark? It tasted very different from my previous experience of it, when I had shark and chips at Geaie's. There it was blubbery, soft- fleshed and with comb-like bones; here it was light and clean-textured and very fine indeed (from a different part, no doubt), stewed in cucumber, onion and chilis. I couldn't detect any of the tomato they claim also to be in it.
Escovitch is another speciality — pickled fish, which is here a red mullet (a fish that can be quite difficult to eat without doing a Queen Mother), warm and lying in its marinade, a sharp, clear sauce of lime, tomatoes and chilis and exceptionally good. If you want to try a staple of Jamaican cooking have a plate of ackee and salt cod. Ackee is a fruit-vegetable which seems to taste of little itself, but is good for soaking up the flavours of what- ever it is cooked along with — a 'stretcher'.
I am afraid to say that my enthusiasm for the fish didn't carry itself over to the meat course, not by a long way. Having shown what I was made of by ordering the shark to start with, I felt I had no alternative but to proceed with the curried goat. In fact, my instinct was wholly trustworthy: having tried what else was on offer I saw that I had made the best possible choice. The fried chicken with rum, onion, soy sauce and peppers was stringy beyond belief (my goat tasted like the finest fillet by comparison) and a miserable disappointment, but the roast pork Calypso — petrifed pork chops with dark rum, garlic, ground ginger and lime juice — was repulsive.
To be on the safe side, go for the spinach with garlic for a vegetable. If you're used to them I'm sure the yam, dasheen, sweet potato and green banana are a joy: to me they looked like pumice-stone and tasted of polyfilla. In a pioneering spirit I tried the Devil Plantain, a gargantuan banana- ish fruit intensively fried in butter, rum and syrup and arranged in a desultory way around a central blob of ice-cream: it had something to be said for it.
Don't even look at the wine list. Carib- bean rum punch (different in every mixing) is the thing to drink here; if you have enough, your critical faculties will be satis- factorily blurred. Not that I mean to be harsh: avoid the meat and a good time is on the cards for around £10 a head.
Nigella Lawson
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