Description
Saaris is a cheerful Nigerian restaurant at the southern end of Inglewood's Market Street district, a storefront across the street from the big post office, three steps down, with African art on the walls. CNN blares from the television set mounted in the corner. On weekend nights, the restaurant fills up fast. The cooking is very, very slow. The cuisine is nominally that of the Igbo, in the southeast of Nigeria, which means that the egusi stew automatically comes with spinach, the chicken stew is fortified with tomato, there is dried crawfish ground up in almost everything, and isi-ewu, the famous Igbo dish of goat's-head soup, is at least technically on the menu. The customers come from almost everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, and some of the staff hail from places such as Kenya and TanzaniaFufu, the doughy starch that makes up a lot of the bulk at Saaris, comes in many guises here, including garri, eba and freshly pounded yam, but the basic model - the one you get if you just ask for fufu - is essentially mashed cassava, a lump of the stuff the size of a loaf of unbaked bread, that is slightly shiny, slightly sticky, a little in the direction of Play-Doh. The house special is a dish of boiled plantains served with spicy greens and a bony, juicy slab of cod. The delicious bean porridge, made with long-cooked black-eyed peas, is always the first dish to disappear from the table. See full review.
