Juneteenth walk on Lark leads to Keobi
West African fare of new eatery caps culinary stroll along ever-changing street
In search of food, I made a pilgrimage of sorts. With patios newly open and restaurants greenlighted last week for indoor table service, I wanted to walk in a restaurant-dense neighborhood. Tired of solo pandemic drives to towns for takeout, I wanted to feel the return to the “new normal” in the sight and sounds of people dining in the street.
More than that, on the heels of powerful local protests, I wanted to see — on my Juneteenth walk — the yellow letters of the Black Lives Matter mural painted with pride along several blocks of Lark Street, Albany’s “village in the city.” With Pride Month underway, I wanted to see the arching rainbow balloons outside Oh Bar and the creatively partitioned sidewalk seating stretching from Cafe Hollywood to Lark St. Poke Bar. And from the circulating lists of black-owned businesses, I wanted to check out the wood art at Yamaguchie and Great Exbaketations’ cakes at Lark Street Mercantile. The point of supporting black-owned eateries and businesses — should it even need restating — is to dismantle the racial wage gap through increased support.
First, I’d promised myself a Korean bulgogi rice bowl, spiralized potatoes on a stick and melon ice cream from the new, white-and-yellow Son of Egg at Lark and Madison, where barstools newly flank storefront windows. Along Lark, I’d collect a bottle of Mexican rosé on hold at Post since National Rosé Day and lust over the tinned anchovies and Kunik cheese in their high-end grocery section while clocking masked and maskless patrons on the back patio and picnic tables on Spring. But my walk had a point at the far end of the street: Takeout, and a soft return to reviewing, in a feast of West African dishes from Keobi, the area’s first spot for Nigerian cuisine.
Keobi was born during the pandemic. Its eye-popping orange and white color palette promising hygiene and efficiency, the door propped open for contactless entry and floor markers define spacing so customers know where to stand. I gaze at the buffet of crispy fried fish, rice and stews behind the counter’s extended Perspex shield and spot Nkulenu’s natural fermented palm wine next to bottled beers in the cooler. No one is dining in; every customer is here for takeout ordered online, but the pace is remarkably slow. Relaxed staff smile, a small child runs between the rear kitchen and the server handling counter sales. Chef-owner Kelechi Nwagboso and her husband, Obinna, moved upstate from the Bronx five years ago for a “better life for the children,” and in the 10 short weeks since she opened Keobi, social media has kept business buzzing.
Until now, Umana Restaurant & Wine Bar has long been Albany’s sole bastion for African fare — Senegalese dibi lamb, South African-spiced cornbread and Ethiopian injera platters from the Horn of Africa in the east. So Keobi expands our range of choice with a broad spectrum of West African dishes likely to test Western knowledge of fat- and protein-rich egusi and ogbono, the seeds from melon and gourds, and their natural thickening properties in stews, or familiarity with delicacies like nkwobi, spicy cow feet stewed in thick chile sauce, or black snails sauteed with sliced onion and hot peppers. It’s been some years since I’ve had one of my favorite breakfast dishes, Nigerian egg stew scrambled with tomatoes and served over palm oil-fried plantains, or commendable jollof rice served with crisp fish, skin shimmering, or goat meat on cleaved bones.
Alongside, you might add grated cassava abacha, fried plantains or vinegary red cabbage salad. There’s a marriage of spice and texture in peppered goat, the counterpoints of loosened braised meat and chewy skin against sweet sauteed peppers. Some dishes — oxtail, curry goat, plantain porridge — will be familiar from Jamaican menus, but the joy of Keobi is the chance for your taste buds to explore.
Central to your meal are thick African meat soups with pungent flavors: the earthiness of goat, oiliness of smoked fish and shrimp cooked into a savory corn meal porridge (it pulls up a scent memory of my father’s smoked kipper and porridge breakfasts). Lighter, delicate flavors cling to spiced mashed black-eyed beans or cubed yams cooked in palm oil with capers and spice.
The soups come with options for sides, but choose fufu, a bland, pounded cassava-root puree plastic-wrapped into a smooth boule. White, starchy and stretchy, it falls somewhere between mashed potato and wet dough. Pinch off a small chunk between fingers and roll into a ball in the palm of your hand to dip in the soup. A good start might be the ila okra soup or cassava leaves cooked with palm oil and smoked fish. I’m fond of Nigerian bitterleaf soup with submerged wedges of smoked fish; Keobi’s version is rich and fragrant. Try ewedu, a soup of softly pureed jute leaf, viscous from added locust bean and swirled through tomato stew hiding chunks of slow simmered, unnamed meat.
Order a few Keobi “house pies” — crimped pastry hand pies filled with chicken, beef or fish — and moi moi, a spicy bean cake steamed like suet pudding and sold in a blue foil pouch. Wash it all down with a cold beer or, better yet, a bottle of creamy Ghanaian palm wine, savoring the funky fermented flavor that merges the silkiness of nigori sake with the barnyard odor of Brett yeast in natural wine.
This new stroll down Lark Street flips open my 20-year dining-memory Rolodex. Grad-school years slinging espresso drinks in Caffe Dolce (home now to El Mariachi Tapas), late nights carrying pints and jerk-spiced “rasta pasta” to tightly packed tables in the upstairs Lionheart pub (now Bombers’ second floor). A time when I lived next door to Yono’s on Hamilton Street or opposite Mcguire’s on State. An era when we dined to jazz at Farnham’s Larkin, munched sweetcorn fritters at Justin’s (now Savoy Taproom), shared popcorn and splits with Rocky in the original Palais Royal and transported Sukhothai or Amazing Wok takeout to a friend’s basement apartment that would become the wine bar Antica Enotica, The Wine Bar and Bistro, Lark & Lilly, Mio Posto and now Post on Lark. It’s easy to scan the juice, beer and coffee shops and pull up ghosts of dinners past. In a perennially reimagined neighborhood; the only constant is change.