Veganizing “Friends”: The Joey Special!!!

   There’s an exciting new pop-up to look out for, London! The Vegan Nigerian, a.k.a. Tomi Makanjuola, held her first vegan pop-up dinner last night at La Suite West Hotel in Bayswater, a.k.a. west AF but worth it, and with any luck it’ll be the first of many such events, if not the prequel to a café or restaurant, although pop-ups do have the benefit of seeming so cool and exclusive and everyone knows I like to pretend I’m cool. This meal had some kinks to work out, and there is room for improvement, but it showed so much potential for the future and I can’t wait to eat more.

   The dinner was held at La Suite West’s restaurant called Raw, a vegan-friendly place where I believe Tomi is a chef and they have a vegan English breakfast (the food not tea) that rightly doesn’t cost more than the non-vegan ones and so a trip there is in order. It was nice to have the fancy space available for this and not be in someone’s living room; it made it all seem very professional. A hilarious waitress came around with water and spilled mine and then told us how nervous she was, and we immediately said let’s all be friends since we’re clearly kindred spirits. A great start (not sarcasm). Then boxes of mango and pineapple juice were brought to our table (but no additional glasses; maybe they expected people to choose between water or juice, and like hell if I’m gonna ever limit my liquids!) which was kind of adorable. The wait for the first course was somewhat long, so having whole boxes of juice per table really helped the time pass/contribute to a terrible sugar rush.

   For the first course, you had to choose between the vegetable peppersoup and the okra and sweet potato salad. Me, being dumb, I thought “Oh I’ve had vegetable soup for dinner for like 3 nights in a row, who would want it again” and got the salad. It was fine, but I tried my friend’s soup and it was SPECTAC. So I chose wrongly and I’ll never forget the regret. ​No just kidding, the salad was fine, a little misleading as it was mostly warm sweet potato chunks with very nicely seasoned okra. Two foods I love, and the okra was really good, but it was mostly sweet potato, and pretty plain at that. Like a whole big steamed sweet potato cut up on a plate with some okra. I may have just gotten unlucky with my plating favoring the potato more than okra and maybe others had a more balanced mix. It was fine, but that much sweet potato needed a sauce or a marinade maybe. Or just lesser amounts. Fine, though. ​

​     But that soup was really fantastic, a stand-out. The first thing I thought was that I need to find out how to make it because I want it for my next possible dinner, and I want a lot of it and I don’t want to have to steal it from my friend. It was a clear broth, which was unexpected (you hear pepper soup, you think like pureed red pepper or something (gross), but the one-word version of peppersoup tells you otherwise or something), with a mix of some chopped soup vegetables in there (potato and zucchini I think I saw? I don’t know I didn’t eat it), and then the whole thing was freaking doused in pepper, so much that it burned my throat going down, and chili pepper I assume, and of course other spices and yes I need to do some serious research before I try to make it myself, and anyway it was glorious. I feel like even though it burned so much, people who don’t really like spicy food would still enjoy it because the flavor was so sophisticated and interesting. Or maybe that’s a dumb thing to say, but it’s also dumb not to like spicy food. I’m really joking. I really can’t believe how much I’m going on about a freaking vegetable soup like I’ve lost my mind but my goodness, it was so good.

​       We also got a little basket of bread and the bread was good. I can say bread in Russian now. In semester 2 of this $!*(#)&$%^(!#*) language and I can say bread, at least.

        Choice was over after this course, which I appreciated, having made the wrong choice so early in the game and having lost all confidence in my ability to choose from that point on. Don’t know how I’m going to get dressed tomorrow. The main course was coconut rice with efo riro, or spinach stew, with baked plantain. I tried to make coconut rice once from a recipe online. It used a lot of full fat coconut milk, and so might have been good for a rice pudding, but it was too sweet for me for savory food. Because of this bad experience, I was hesitant about the pairing here. Of course, this being a professional chef, the coconut rice was just subtle enough to tell something cool was going on and formed a great complement to the stew. I would have liked more stew to balance the stew-to-rice ratio (my plate was clean when I finished, no traces of sauce, which seems odd when you’ve just eaten a stew), but what we had was very nice. You know how most spinach stews, or curries for the most part, feel very heavy in their spice profile, like everything is dark and deep and low on the chart of some unknown quality, like just totally warm but heavy? I don’t know but anyway, this one somehow felt bright, which was really cool. It had all the interesting warmth you want from a stew yet accomplished it without the heavy tones. The plate was encircled by smears of a delicious and thick red pepper sauce, a great addition to the mix. And then the baked plantain slices were placed on top. Plantains are great, and although these seemed a little dry from what I’m used to (probably because they were baked not fried), they were still plantains, so, good. In a nice gesture from the kitchen, the kind that makes people happy because everyone likes free unexpected stuff, we also got an extra bowl of plantains for the table which I think I had more than my share of, sorry tablemates. 

        By this point I think we were already two hours into the dinner, which is extremely slow. I have a feeling the waitstaff just comprised friends of the chef who volunteered, and it was the first such pop-up, so delays are understandable but definitely something to work on. You don’t want people getting antsy. Luckily, they put a whole pitcher of water (cucumber water!) down for the table, so that was a spectacular move. People who work in restaurants or know people that do: ALWAYS give a table a jug of water, or at least the option to have one, ESPECIALLY if your place uses those bullshit glasses that fit about half an ounce of liquid in them and after every sip you need to flag down someone for more water but since this is London they never come. Those glasses are bullshit and should never have been made legal. So, pitchers are great, and every restaurant in the history and future of the world to ever exist should learn this.

      Lastly, we had dessert, because that’s usually when people have dessert, except for one really strange fashion editor I worked for one summer in NYC who had dessert before her meals. She was strange for other reasons. Anyway, dessert was apple and papaya crumble with malt and vanilla coconut cream. We had some disagreement at our table as to whether the coconut cream would be ‘malt and vanilla’ flavored or whether the malt was a separate ingredient. I thought the latter and I was right, which restored some of my faith in my ability to make decisions. I think the malt aspect was a tiny bit of molasses-like syrup dotted on the crumble, or it could have been the flavor of granola-like topping. We can never be sure, though, because malt isn’t actually a real thing. It’s just something American candy makers and old-timey ice cream shoppes would advertise as a way to charge an extra 5c but it was really a lie. Malt is a lie. No I’m just joking I’m sure it’s a real thing I just have no idea what it is because I never liked those malted milk balls as a kid and I would never order a malted milkshake when a perfectly good chocolate milkshake was perfectly good without it. So I just don’t know. Anyway, dessert might have been the best part of the meal. Well no the soup that I didn’t have was my favorite, but the crumble was next. We were surprised at how well papaya worked to break up the apple flavor, especially because baked papaya seemed to have a lot more flavor than raw papaya. A wonderful combination. On the side was a separate cup of perfect coconut cream, like an actual cup. It was so much! It was probably too much but I will never look a gift coconut cream in the mouth. It was so decadent and smooth and light, the perfect consistency and flavor. Coconut cream is RG.

​         Before we returned to the somehow freezing again weather, Tomi’s friend made a speech that was the cutest, sweetest thing except when he said he thought vegan food was terrible at one point in his life, before her. Get a new story, omnivores! Y’all are a broken record! No but it was really sweet and it just seemed like all the guests at this first pop-up were nice people who wanted to support this nice person. There were some flaws but for the first go, it showed so much potential and I’m excited to see (eat) what’s to come. 

VEGAN NIGERIAN POP-UP AT RAW
Water speed: Took a bit to get water, but when it came, it came in a big pitcher. That’s the way uh huh uh huh.
Service: I’ll give a pass since they were friends volunteering I think, and that’s super nice. One thing to learn next time is to bring the food for everyone at one table at once. Guy would come out with four plates, give two to the table next to us, and then two to our table, leaving another two at our table to wait for like 10 minutes for the next batch, and we aren’t heathens so we’d wait, and it was supes awk.
Bathrooms: The bathrooms are down a hall of the hotel (very close to the space) and SUPER DARK. Like, I didn’t know how to exit the first time. It was kind of scary dark, use the flashlight on your phone dark. I also got stuck in the stall once because I was pushing out but it’s a pull-in door. Dumb. 
Food: Very enjoyable and shows a lot of potential.
Bonus: New nice-seeming person to look out for!