Dining
BANAADIR
823 Murfreesboro Road, 360-0816
Photos by: ericengland.net
Before there were iPhones and BlackBerrys, before there was Chowhound.com, before there was concierge software to provide the ratings along with the map coordinates of any restaurant anywhere, there were cab drivers. Who better to ask for restaurant tips than guys who spend their days and nights delivering hungry people to their meals and picking them up after they’ve eaten? Privy to every kind of overindulged, post-prandial criticism and praise, cab drivers are a rolling corps of well-informed restaurant recommenders—the perfect analog resource for anyone who can set down a PDA long enough to ask across the Plexiglas partition, “How’s it going? What’s good around here?”
With that in mind, we were encouraged by the traffic at Banaadir, where a motley fleet of American-made cars topped with taxi lights fills the restaurant’s parking lot along the busy bank of Murfreesboro Road.
The unassuming yellow storefront bears not only the restaurant’s name—on a blue-and-white sign—but also an advertisement for Global Money Services, which is housed on the premises. When we first entered the building, with its former tenant’s billiard hall mural bleeding through the new coat of yellow paint, we wondered if the establishment was in fact a restaurant. Little about the room—a constellation of flickering fluorescent light tubes, a haphazard array of pink-and-green plastic columns affixed to the walls, a laundry sink in one corner, and a thick smell of burning incense—conveys the feel of a restaurant. But a lone diner—eating from a plastic plate with the design commonly found in Chinese restaurants—convinced us that we were indeed in a dining establishment. Furthermore, a collection of sports posters, yellow-and-blue flags and maps on the stark-white wood-plank walls implied that we were, in fact, in a Somali restaurant. (Had we been able to Google on an iPhone, we would have known that Banaadir is the name of a region in Somalia.)
Then we wondered if maybe we were in a private Somali restaurant, since there did not appear to be any servers or staff. But just as we were losing confidence, a smiling and gracious Marion Abdulle greeted us. Abdulle’s cousins Jaylan Abshar and Mohamed Abshar own Banaadir, which they opened two years ago. The restaurant is a family affair, flavored by the cultural ties between Somalia and Italy. (Somalia gained its independence from Italy in 1960 after nearly a century of Italian occupation.) In the triple role of hostess, server and chef, Abdulle told us to pick a table, then asked what we would like to eat.
“Do you have a menu?” we asked.
“Yes,” she said, “but it changes.”
“What do you have today?”
Abdulle listed goat, chicken and beef. She then offered a choice of rice or spaghetti, as well as something that sounded like “federation,” which we interpreted to be a mixture of the two.
Abdulle retreated to the kitchen, where we heard things start to sizzle. She returned with Styrofoam cups of opaque pink juice and four brown-spotted bananas. We were given no further instructions.
The juice, which tasted like a watermelon Jolly Rancher, had a sheen of ice chips across the top, which disappeared almost instantly upon hitting the tongue, differentiating the concoction from tepid camp-cooler bug juice and giving it the texture—and only the texture—of a perfectly chilled martini.
Then came the food. On one visit, four overflowing plates arrived for two of us: goat, steak with sautéed tomatoes and onions, the abundant federation of rice and pasta and a large salad.
Abdulle, a Somali native, learned to cook from her Italian father, and the spaghetti has more in common with an Italian meal than with the thickly red-coated noodles that appear alongside fried fish in many Southern-food establishments. With a light coating of tomato sauce and finely ground beef, the plate of al dente pasta would have made an ample meal on its own. The rice—sometimes flecked with red- and green-colored grains, celery and onions, and flavored with coriander, cardamom, cinnamon and turmeric—was an appealing, flavorful bed for the meats and vegetables.
While the federation of rice and pasta was a near-absurd abundance of starch, on neither trip were we offered muufo—a Somali variation of cornbread—or a Somali flatbread akin to the Ethiopian injera. Abdulle says she makes muufo late in the afternoon to serve in the evening.
Of the meats we tried, goat was by far the most interesting. (The majority of Somalis follow a halal diet, with no pork.) Roasted with onions, garlic, tomatoes, carrots and soy sauce, the tender meat—with crispy, caramelized edges—fell off the short ribs. The red tint, Abdulle explained, was not from any sort of clay oven, but an artificial color, which was also used to accent the rice grains at one of our meals.
We tried two chicken dishes, which Abdulle differentiated as “chicken” (a thin, pan-fried breast) and “little chicken” (a stir-fry of diced chicken with onions and tomatoes). The subtle, earthy flavors were the same in both dishes, but we preferred the moist, plump chunks of the little chicken.
The beef, from a halal butcher in the neighborhood, was also thin and pan-cooked, but it was very tough and had little flavor to recommend it.
A pale green purée of serrano peppers, garlic and lemon juice accompanied all the dishes, offering a colorful, piquant counterpoint to the earthy spices. Traditionally, the bananas are offered as a cooling foil to the peppery heat, but ours remained unpeeled on the table, along with the uninspiring mix of iceberg lettuce and shredded carrots.
On a second visit, we asked that all our food be served together so we could share. If we understood correctly, Abdulle referred to the presentation of a communal platter as “sports” style, since it was how athletes eat in a group. The order of chicken, little chicken and goat, along with a mountain of federation, fed three adults and one child.
When it became clear that we were lingering over the meal and not planning to leave any time soon, Abdulle brought us Sytrofoam cups of very hot, very sweet tea, which we enjoyed. The atmosphere is endearingly low-key—concrete floors, plaid tablecloths, a TV playing in the corner, the name Banaadir spray-painted on one wall.
Abdulle says they have some plans to spiff up the place, but for now the service is great and the price is right. We’re not exactly sure how the prices broke down, because we never saw a menu. But on both trips our total bill was $14—less than it would cost to take a cab there and back.
Banaadir is open 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week.