Last month @SteveR and I met at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Crown Heights for the first afternoon of their Juneteenth celebration. A brief stroll around the grounds turned up no food that enticed us, but I’d come with a backup plan, and Steve had his car.
We drove to Lazeez, a tiny storefront on Flatbush Ave. about a mile southeast of Brooklyn College. Late last year the website Muslim Foodies identified it as the first and only Sudanese restaurant in the city.
The wall menu didn’t give much indication of the meal we had in mind. However, very quickly the counterwoman handed each of us a meat sambuxa …
… which might have been what the wall menu described as a chicken patty. Steve and I ordered kofta and fried fish, then sat down at a small table. By and by two other women arrived – I gather that the first woman had called in reinforcements – and one of them pulled a second small table alongside ours. Not to sit down, but to allow room for more food, which kept coming above and beyond our original order.
Chicken kofta.
Cheese sambuxas.
Stuffed pepper and eggplant.
Fried tilapia.
Sweets.
More sweets, and coffee. There was a platter-sized green salad with cherry tomatoes in there, too. We did end up eating (and paying for) much more than we expected, including those sweets that went home (with me). It’s a good thing we left Weeksville without eating (which, for that matter, is how I arrived there).
I can’t put my finger on the seasoning of the kofta, which I really enjoyed, or the filling of the pepper and eggplant. Perhaps Steve, who detected cardamom in the coffee, can say more.
