I headed to Lagos, Nigeria to visit some friends and I did a lot of research before hand – Where should we eat? What should we do? Thankfully Lagos offered a lot of foodie experiences, for both my friends and I. I’ll break my visit into 3 posts – Nigerian Food, Other Food, and Experiences.
I work with quite a few people from Nigeria so I picked their brains before the trip and I also found this blog: Eat.Drink.Lagos based in Lagos. I wanted to make sure I had the opportunity to try a number of local dishes and I wanted to expose my Nigerian friends to other worldly dishes to broaden their horizons. I really wanted to take them out for sushi, but alas, raw fish was just a little too extreme for them at the time – baby steps!
Nigerian Food:
We ate at Yellow Chilli twice. Recommended by quite a few folks, we were pretty impressed by a number of things at the restaurant. One of the first things I noticed was that all the servers were male. The servers were well dressed and service was to the level of a really good Canadian restaurant (at least the first time we were there – the second time was not quite as good). This was my opportunity to try real Nigerian food, and to try my hand (literally LOL) at what is called ‘swallow’. ‘Swallow’ is the practice of using your right hand to form a ball out of some kind of pasty carbohydrate and then using that as a scoop for stew or soup. You definitely need to wash your hands before and after doing this, and they bring a bowl of water to your table so you don’t even have to get up!
I had watched YouTube videos on eating Nigerian food before my trip so I had an idea of what to expect, and of course M was a really good teacher. I knew I wanted to try the snails because a guy on one of the videos I watched said they tasted like ‘earth’… don’t ask me why that made me want to try them LOL. They were actually so large they reminded me of the huge slugs that we would find at my grandparents’ house in Victoria, BC.
Visit 1:
Groundnuts (aka peanuts) were served as an appetizer (they’re so good in Nigeria – fresh roasted!). You can buy groundnuts everywhere – they’re sold in re-used plastic pop bottles by men and women in the middle of the road as you drive along.
As our first course I chose the Spicy Stewed Snails. The little suckers were a bit chewy but the tomato sauce was delicious! Full of spicy flavour I’d love to make this sauce at home (I’ll save the snails for special occasions LOL).
The Seafood Okro was a dish recommended by many, so I had to give it a shot. With okra (which turns the sauce a bit slimy), fish, shrimp and prawns, this dish definitely has a spice profile I’ve never experienced before. The blob of white stuff under plastic wrap is pounded yam (sorry, the photo I took of it unwrapped didn’t turn out). With your right hand, you swipe off a bit of the pounded yam with your finger, make a little ball out of it, flatten it a bit and use your thumb to make an indent in it. You then use it to scoop some of the seafood okro and shovel it into your mouth while trying not to make a huge mess. It took some practice, and I still prefer to eat with utensils 🙂 I found the dried fish to be really tough and chewy (of course) and I just didn’t enjoy the slimy aspect of the sauce.
Visit 2:
Our last supper in Lagos was another traditional Nigerian meal at Yellow Chilli. The Crispy Prawns were huge and the best fried prawns I’ve ever had – not too greasy and the bread crumbs were just enough. They were super tender and delicious! I think they were served with a tartar sauce and a chilli sauce. M gave me the bland, white tartar sauce – ha ha.
The Yam Pottage Special was super tasty and I would definitely eat it again. Slightly sweet and not too spicy, it’s made with yam cooked in palm oil with beef and snails. I quite liked the flavours and wouldn’t mind figuring out how to make it at home (minus the snails).
Egusi Soup is made of melon seeds and vegetables and from a choice of proteins we chose goat. The restaurant was out of pounded yam so we got amala to eat the soup with. According to M, amala is dried unripened plantain that is ground up and turned into a paste. You use it the same way as pounded yam – as ‘swallow’. I could taste the plantain flavour and found this was way more sticky than the pounded yam. If I were to eat ‘swallow’ again I’d definitely eat pounded yam over the sticky amala. The goat was fall apart tender but they cook it with the skin on – I’m not a fan. The flavours in the Egusi Soup were not like anything I’ve ever had before… very interesting!
The food at Terra Kulture was awesome and the restaurant offers a full experience with an art gallery upstairs and a gift shop (that closed before we could check it out). There was some really nice art in the gallery and M and I quite enjoyed the slow walk through it.
Although I knew the price of the beef suya at the restaurant was ridiculous, I had to try it. It was super tender and spicy but not too hot. It was the best meat on a stick I’ve ever had (although WAY more expensive than buying it off the street). My jollof rice and stewed chicken were also awesome. My nose was running, my eyes were watering and my throat was burning but the flavours were delicious. I think this was my favourite meal of the whole trip. I have tried making stew at home and it was not even close to this.
M got stewed beef, fried plantain and fried rice. This was definitely the best fried rice we had in Lagos.
M scoped out this restaurant before my arrival to the city. It’s a truly beautiful location with a small indoor lounge and a huge outdoor two level patio overlooking the water. This restaurant has so much potential! Upon our arrival I took photos of the back of the restaurant and the water off to the side of the restaurant with my Sony camera. As we walked up the stairs the bouncer says – no photos! He was very curt. When I said no problem, I was done, he actually wanted to take my camera from me. He was serious about no photos of the restaurant or in the restaurant and even though I promised not to take any more photos, we stood on the steps and argued for a minute about whether he was going to take my camera from me and whether or not he would let us in. We looked around to find our driver and would have walked away in another second had this guy not finally let us in. All I can say is he was a giant ass. I’ve never argued with a huge bouncer before (at least not sober), but I felt like this was a good time to stand my ground – he was not getting my camera, and we were going to eat in this restaurant! It was not the best way to make a first impression of the restaurant, and I didn’t understand why the heck I couldn’t take photos anyways. All that being said, I don’t have many photos of the evening because I was afraid of getting kicked out after all that drama.
Once we were seated service was really slow and not very friendly (I was getting used to poor customer service everywhere by this point). We both ordered the grilled fish, because heck, we were practically sitting in the water! When the server finally came out with our fish (the main photo at the top of this post), she came out with one order of fish and a side plate – she thought we were sharing. At no point did she ever ask to clarify that we were going to share one meal – she just assumed so (no communication skills whatsoever…). When I said that we had both ordered the same dish – one each – she just said OH, turned on her heals and walked away. We were left there hoping she was going to bring us another serving soon. I’m pretty sure there was no rush placed on the meal because it was at least another 20 minutes before the fish came. I tried to eat my meal as slow as I could so both of us wouldn’t be eating alone but it was very cold, very quickly. Our very beautiful evening out turned into a bit of a debacle simply because of bad customer service all around. That being said, we watched fishermen net their catch and we watched the sun go down… it was still a beautiful evening and we, of course, had each others company.
We also had dinner at NOK which had really good reviews and was recommended by a coworker here in Calgary. We were seated outside, so it was dark with big fans blowing at us to cool things off (and maybe to keep the mosquitoes at bay). Unfortunately, we could barely speak to each other because of the noisy fans, my photos of the food look like crap (because it was too dark and I hate flash photography in a restaurant), and M wasn’t a fan of the food. We shared a few dishes and when I asked M if he wanted more, he politely but bluntly said ‘not from this menu’… and so we stopped at Domino’s Pizza on the way back to the hotel and ordered a chicken suya pizza.
I quite liked the food at NOK, and other than the fact that we couldn’t keep a conversation, the back patio really is beautiful. We had a smokey bean dip with naan bread (although, I found it too sweet), goat sliders, and a grilled fish cooked in leaf packets. At least we both thought the fish was really quite nice.
The building is an artistic statement in itself. If you ever make it to Lagos, I actually do recommend you check out the restaurant for food and drinks.
Street Food
I’d heard a lot about suya – grilled street meat – and I was happy to try it one evening. Ironically, we stopped for the beef suya after I took my friends out for Thai food… they didn’t like the Thai food and were still hungry!
Suya is thinly cut beef, chicken or pork and is grilled over a charcoal pit. I don’t think they use great cuts of meat because the beef suya that we had was tough and chewy in parts, but the seasoning is to die for. Seriously – if the street vendors would sell it I’d buy a huge package. It’s kind of like a really spicy and flavourful Shake’n’Bake – a powdery texture that wakes up all your senses. The beef suya was served in newspaper with toothpicks. The big pile of meat was 1000 naira – around $3.00 Canadian. What a deal!
Unfortunately I didn’t try any other street food. There were many neat looking things, like puff puff – they would have been safe for me to eat… deep fried dough that looked like TimBits. However, I did get sick when I was there, who knows from what – water, food, anything… so I made a conscious decision not to go out of my way to try any other street food.
I purchased ‘suya seasoning’ from the grocery store to try to make it at home. Just like the ‘jollof rice’ and ‘fried rice’ seasonings I also purchased, I’m sure it will taste nothing like the original. But, now that the snow is melted off the deck and I can access my BBQ I’ll have to try to make some suya chicken.
M was impressed with my desire to try so many local dishes. I would say that we didn’t try anything too crazy (although some folks would likely think that eating snails (twice!) was a little out there… and I would definitely say I was happy that I tried everything I did. The bonus is that nothing was gross! I do look forward to trying more Nigerian food over time.
dawn PATTERSON says
Great info and made me drool to try some of the food you described. The pictures gave me a good idea about the appearance of the food as well.
I know that I will never get to Nigeria and we don’t have Nigerian food where I live so it was another experience in living vicariously through another person’s experience.