Olaide’s Kitchen is in the space previously occupied by Bordeloi’s, in a small strip mall on Ernston Road just east of Route 9. There has been minimal change to the space–basically the artwork, etc., are African rather than Asian and that’s about it. One thing that hasn’t changed seems to be the speed, or lack thereof, in food preparation–it took a long time to be served in a basically empty restaurant.
We had Jollof Rice with Chicken and Ewa Aganyin (Nigerian brown beans served with ground pepper sauce). Jollof Rice is apparently the classic signature dish, but it did not seem all that different from what used to be (still is?) called “Spanish rice”. The chicken was good–two or three large pieces of white meat rather than the bits and pieces with bone-in that I was expecting. The Ewa Aganyin was sort of like refried beans, only drier, but came with sauteed fried fish. This latter is not indicated on the menu, so we were a bit confused when it arrived. Both the chicken and the fish were in a tomato-based sauce; the Ewa Agnyin also had a good helping of ground chili peppers on it, which made it somewhat spicy. The Ewa Aganyin also came with Dodo, which turned out to be a large portion of fried plantains (maduro, or sweet plantains, not the starchy ones).
It was certainly different than what we were used to, the real problem being that the menu was so unfamiliar that we had no idea what to order or what to expect. For example, the stews come with a choice of “pounded yam, amala, eba, semolina, tuwo, or wheat.” I might as well throw a dart in that list to pick one.
They do have goat as one of the meat choices, also “assorted meat” (which includes tripe and other less common cuts).
Main courses are about $12-$15, certainly reasonable for the portion sizes.
