Previous SlideNext Slide

Apologies if you’re trying to get my attention, but I am having a very important and intimate moment with some fried plantain. It’s too sweet and luscious to think about anything else. Maybe it’s easiest if you join me for some of this hot, golden, starchy goodness?

I’m in Nicholson Street, Footscray, an African hub in one of our city’s most multicultural suburbs. Within a few hundred metres, you can buy teff, a gluten-free grain from East Africa, and eat in Ethiopian restaurants that serve injera, a flatbread made from teff, as part of their no-cutlery-required meals. There are also stores selling gorgeous abayas and jilbabs – modest dresses with head coverings – and beauty salons for hair braiding.

And there’s Colin Walcott-Taylor’s year-old African Calabash, a friendly restaurant for West African food cooked Sierra Leone-style.

The council calls this area Little Africa, but that’s somewhat diminishing. Sierra Leone and Ethiopia are about 6000 kilometres apart, double the distance from Istanbul to London. We don’t lump Turkey and England under an umbrella of “Little Europe”, nor should we conflate the very different cuisines of Africa.

Anyway, if you are coming to help me with my plantain, you can also have some of my egusi, a soup made from blended seeds, in this case pumpkin. They’re cooked with curry spices into a thick porridge, then seasoned with red palm oil and studded with stewed beef. Rich, hearty and beautifully balanced, it’s a generous meal.

Fufu is the natural accompaniment. Fu-who? Fufu can mean any number of starches – cassava, wheat, corn – cooked with water to form a soft ball that’s pulled apart to dip into soups and stews. In this case, it’s pounded yam: filling, mild and an easy medium for soaking up flavoursome egusi.

Jollof rice (long-grain rice stained red with tomato and capsicum) is a West African staple. This Sierra Leonean version is cooked for three hours so the bottom layer burns a little and the smoke-seasoned rice can be carefully scooped from the top.

It’s excellent with fish, in this case whole tilapia, which is seasoned with paprika, cumin and cinnamon before frying so the skin crisps into delicious shards.

Colin Walcott-Taylor was born in Sierra Leone, grew up in England, and has been in Australia for 10 years, where he worked in banking and risk assessment before restaurants lured him. He’s running African Calabash with his mum, Virginia, and sister, Maggie.

The food is quite traditional but they do tone down the chilli. Even so, the hot sauce made my ears ring and saw me swigging their house-made ginger tonic. If you want to sneak a piece of my plantain, I suggest you interrupt my reverie with a chilli distraction.