Homeward bound

Ezo makes you forget you’re not from the lower Sahara

By Kathy Gunst

Ezo African Restaurant 51 Oak Street, Portland, ME (207) 772-1796
Open for lunch and dinner Mon.-Sat.
Visa, MC, AE
No bar

TAKE IT EZO: amiable, delectable, and affordable.

What I don’t know about African food could fill a large book. But my imagination conjures up steaming bowls of peanut soup and spicy stews made with root vegetables and grains bubbling away in cast iron cauldrons. When I heard that Portland was now home to Ezo African Restaurant on Oak Street I ran there hoping to find the dishes that I had been dreaming of.

I was not disappointed. While there is no peanut soup on the menu, Ezo offers very fresh, very simple home-style African cooking at extremely affordable prices. Ezo is refreshingly unpretentious. Entering the small diner-like restaurant on a recent evening, I was greeted with the smell of curry, cardamom, and paprika mingling with the delicious fragrance of chicken being grilled. Several large pots of stew simmered in the open kitchen, stirred by a round-faced woman with a big kerchief on her head.

The room was filled with groups of students, and everyone seemed to know each other. At one table a man with dreadlocks stopped by to say hello to a group of Asian girls. Across the room a sincere looking younger couple gazed into each other’s eyes and then started to hoot as old friends entered and pulled up chairs, interrupting the couple’s romantic bliss. My husband was so taken with the simple hominess of the place that he almost stood up to fix the smoke alarm that chirped outside the men’s room.

“Ezo is the village from which our father came,” explains the menu. “Through our business we honor him while bringing you authentic African hospitality and foods from the Sudan and our sister African countries. We believe food unites us and binds us sisters and brothers.”

Owners Paul Bandayo, Domini Suru, and Florence Olebe have taken traditional Sudanese recipes and created a small, limited menu. Florence is in the kitchen. As she stirs a big pot of vegetable stew you realize this is truly home-style cooking, a refreshing break from most restaurant food which feels more and more institutionalized with each passing year, each passing trend. At Ezo, the feeling is that you are eating in their home and the food is being cooked just for you.

The menu offers only six choices — ranging from a vegetable plate with homemade flatbread to Sawarama, spicy chicken or beef strips served with grilled bread, lentils, and mixed vegetables. My advice is to come with a big appetite (or a small crowd) and order the Unity Platter, a traditional African dinner featuring four of the dishes from the menu on a shared platter with lentils, rice and a homemade bread plate. The menu claims it serves four, but two hungry people could attack it nicely.

Despite the simplicity, Ezo has several small touches that make you feel truly welcome. When you sit down they bring you hot towels on a little silver tray to clean your hands. This is a custom I’m familiar with from Japanese restaurants and one I always appreciate. Drinks consist of juice, soda, and water, but diners are welcome to bring their own wine or beer.

All the dishes served at Ezo appear to be renditions of the same foods: chicken, vegetable stew, lentils, and tender, delicious homemade flatbread. The Sukura-Wiki is an “ancestral bean stew and vegetables served on flatbread,” and African Kisra is described as, “an African stew served on flatbread with vegetables.”

I ordered the Moto-Moto, a plate of marinated and grilled chicken, red with spices, a potato, pea, and carrot stew (redolent with curry and other spices I can’t name), delicious yellow rice, a lentil puree, and a griddle-like bread similar to Indian chapati. The menu invites you to “participate in our tradition of eating from a joint platter, with your hands or using bread to pick up the foods.” I dug in, pulling off small pieces of bread and making a delicious lentil and vegetable stew sandwich. The chicken was so tender it fell off the bone.

The vegetable plate offered the same potato and vegetable stew, a perforated flatbread, collard greens (simply cooked with an exceedingly fresh flavor), and the same lentil puree. Some of the flavors are reminiscent of Indian food, but nothing is overly spicy, just well spiced.

Like Africa itself Ezo is “developing”. It has all the elements of a good restaurant, only it has yet to evolve fully. The food won’t dazzle you, but it is entirely pleasing. The waitstaff is friendly and efficient and tried to answer my many questions (“what spice is that?” “what do you call this bread?” “is there vinegar in the flatbread?”), but the answers were sketchy at best.

The menu offers no appetizers or desserts and the prices are so reasonable that it’s almost shocking. When’s the last time you had dinner for two, ate delicious, homemade food, gave the waiter a $20 bill and actually got back a good chunk of change? Prices range from $4.95 to $5.95 with the Unity Platter at $23. You can’t go wrong.

The downstairs room, used as an overflow dining room, will be turned into an African food market this summer. One can only hope that other dishes and a more fleshed-out menu will come along with it.