Guinean restaurant in NYC?

Could you clarify this a bit. Are you looking for a place that serves the cuisine of Guinea or offers Guinea Pigs on the menu?

happy_stomach wrote:Can anyone recommend a Guinean restaurant in NYC?

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What's Guinean cuisine like?

In order to explain how I felt about the restaurant (Khaloum), I first
have to explain a bit about eating out in Guinea. Namely, that people
never do. Rather, only bachelors with no one to cook for them and
people traveling long distances eat out. The reason is fairly simple:
the food you can buy in the market (usually at rice bars, if you're
trying to buy rice and sauce which is the staple meal) is so far
inferior to whatever food the women in your life (whether it be your
mother, wife, sister or some other designated care-taker) can make that
you would never want to eat outside of the home.

It's difficult to explain why this is the case, except to say two
things. First, the dishes that are prepared lend themselves to being
made in relatively (and I mean relatively) small quantities by someone
who knows and cares about you (or at least cares about what you think
about their cooking ability -- keeping in mind that this is all also
tied to the fact that housekeeping and cooking abilities are extremely
important forms of self-validation for women, even educated/professional
ones). "Sauce," whether it be leaf, peanut or soup sauce, is really
just a bunch of ingredients cooked together until they become mush (the
first two are fairly self-explanatory in this regard, the last is really
a broth like sauce with chunks of meat). On some really basic level
this isn't hard. But because it isn't hard, and because these sauces
are eaten by everyone for two meals a day for almost every day of their
lives, techniques are developed to distinguish one sauce from the next.
Every woman has an opinion about which ingredients go in first, how
long you leave the onions in the oil before you add the next ingredient,
etc. Moreover, every woman has her ways of making the sauce special.
Garlic, ground pepper, papaya, potatoes, these are not necessary
ingredients to the sauce but women occasionally employ them to "spice"
things up. But the special techniques/ingredients either don't get used
or get lost in the large quantities made at rice bars.

So here is my assessment of Khaloum: it was a good rice bar. But then,
you're already a little unfortunate if you have to eat at a rice bar
rather than in your home. I will say, however, two things that struck
me. First: there was a ton more meat in the sauce at Khaloum than I
ever saw in a sauce in Africa. Meat is cheaper here. Second, they only
had leaf sauce available and there were two of us so we also ordered
some fish. I had forgotten how absolutely fabulous African prepared
fish is. It's hard to explain. They put spices (peppers and other
things that I don't know) in the skins and then grill it. This gives
the fish a really fabulous, though slightly subtle flavor. Beyond that,
however, somehow the moisture level is always perfect. I feel that in
the States fish is frequently either too dry or too moist. This fish
was the absolutely perfect in between place. Definitely eat the fish.