Nothing Compares to Chez Gnagna Koty's Senegalese Fare

I cannot tell you if Chez Gnagna Koty's is a good Senegalese restaurant or a bad one, as I have nothing to compare it to. It may be among the very finest Senegalese restaurants in the world, with its large glutinous platters of indecipherable ingredients heavily flavored with tomato paste. Any dish is improved with good wine (I'm sure I read that somewhere) and here one may bring one's own bottle and there is no corkage fee. The menu is intriguing?among the lunch offerings are thiebu djen, $8, thiebu yap for $7, maffee, yassa and, for the vegetarian, domoda and beans cocktail. One can be fairly assured that whatever one orders the taste will not vary more than a degree or two.

In time one might even come to view these dishes as comfort food, though obviously one's idea of comfort food is highly personal. In my case I think of two things: pizza, greasy, oozing, dripping with cheese, sprinkled with red pepper flakes but nevertheless with a very crisp crust; and Indian food, not necessarily of good quality but even from a cheap take-away to be eaten alone and undisturbed (or, as we used to say in my family, undistrubed) in bed or in front of the tv set. Someone else might think of comfort food as a great hideous meatloaf or piles of buttery mashed potatoes, while another might in a sorrowful moment want ice cream eaten straight from the container while lurking surreptitiously in front of an open freezer door. Only the individual knows what will comfort him- or herself, as well as the amount of despair and self-hatred that will sink in after eating, say, a large hot fudge sundae with the fudge so hot that it melts the vanilla-flecked ice cream before almost immediately freezing into warm, glossy chewy black fudge strands and the whole thing slathered with real whipped cream and crispy toasted pecans and you don't have to share it with anyone, you just get to eat the whole thing all by yourself!

I was hoping for lively, catchy Senegalese music; the first time I ate at Gnagna Koty's (how I love the name of this place, so chewy) the CD player was broken and the radio blared rather funereal Boulez; the second time, some months later, musically something was still amiss and a popular radio station spewed its bile across the room. The thiou okra (okra, tomato and onion sauce) must have been very long and slowly cooked, as the okra was plenty disintegrated?or possibly left out. Willow, my five-year-old daughter, had ordered the pot au feu (long-hours-cooked beef stew with fresh vegetables), which proved to be my favorite?a small bowl with several chunks of meat floating atop the greasy broth, so spicy as to be inedible for a five-year-old but nevertheless flavorful for me, although at $14.50 not an inexpensive cup o' soup.

Tom Bell, our ever-patient, enduring friend (you try going to dinner at 6 o'clock at night with a five-year-old, it's basically like hanging out with a chimpanzee on crystal methamphetamine), selected the thiebu djen, also offered at lunch?this fish stewed with tomato sauce, eggplant, yucca and white cabbage served with white rice was not altogether different from my alleged okra in tomato sauce, apart from the strongly fishy flavor, which always makes me nervous in a fish. Other dishes I was tempted to try were: sauce feuille (collard green or spinach with a palm oil sauce); vermicelli (in a mustard and onion sauce); maffe kanja (white cabbage, carrots, potatoes and okra stewed in a peanut butter sauce); and domoda (thick tomato gravy flavored with African spices).

A variety of side orders were available: white, yellow or brown rice, couscous, french fries or mashed potatoes, as well as gari (yucca), attieke (cassava couscous) or fufu (pounded yam)?the latter, rather fascinatingly, proved to be a large paste-colored cube with what I believed to be a wallpaper-paste flavor, a sort of Senegalese polenta. I began to suspect that Senegalese cooking was heavy on the starch, however this was merely a suspicion.

We decided to sample one of the cocktails in the "make your own cocktail" category?nonalcoholic drinks such as bissap, mango, guava?and decided on the tamarind, which, apart from the sugar and water, lacked flavor.

Certainly the food was filling and though the desserts?thiakry (couscous mixed with sour cream, vanilla extract, mixed fruits) the bouroufasi (thin slices of bread dipped into vanilla egg cream and simmered until golden) sounded intriguing, they didn't intrigue enough to want to try on a stomach filled with tomato paste and rice.

Let it be said that the people who own and run this restaurant are no doubt good, worthy people and it is I, the food reviewer, lacking taste and taste buds, who is basically evil. It was very interesting to try Senegalese food!

In A Taste of Africa by Dorinda Hafner (Ten Speed Press, 1993) the author does not specifically offer Senegalese recipes, but did describe fufu?from Ghana?much the same, I expect, as the version served at Gnagna Koty's. Potato flour, warm water, instant potato flakes are combined to make a sort of dough. Hence, no doubt, the paste-like quality. Gari is listed as a dish of the Ivory Coast?cassava powder mixed with water and allowed to swell. Maffee?here spelled maafe, from Mali?is indeed made with tomato paste, and an assortment of vegetables, corn, sweet potato, some tomatoes?flavored with peanut paste. So from my reading I felt that Chez Gnagna Koty's recipes were not only authentic, but probably very fine examples indeed. If you want to try a dish of boneless fish with stieke? cassava couscous and virgin sauce, even knowing that it will probably be some fish with tomato sauce and a bland starch, this is the place to go. And no doubt I will be back, trying to get a grip on why I don't understand this food.

Chez Gnagna Koty's, 530 9th Ave. (betw. 39th & 40th Sts.), 279-1755.