Ruts are not conducive to happy stomachs. Too often, students get into the habit of ordering from the same old restaurant; we have to remember that we live in Manhattan, the paradise of dining and the biggest city in the land of the melting pot, a melting pot that still has unique and ethnic pockets of restaurant goodness. One such place is Krik Krak, nestled right here in euphemized Spanish Harlem.
If sunshine lived in a restaurant, it would live in Krik Krak. The walls of the one-room hole-in-the wall Haitian/Caribbean joint are painted marigold yellow and smattered with brightly colored Haitian artwork, with a huge mural-style piece occupying one side and a couple of random ceramic pineapples. The tables are clothed in plasticized coverings of a polka-dotted version of the wall color and feature cheerful blue-and-white place mats, vases of obviously faux white flowers, and toothpick dispensers. Haitian music, with its island beat and French and Creole lyrics, provides in-seat-dancing tunes, and ABC is shown silently on a TV on the back wall.
The eatery’s patrons share its background, a good sign for those of you hoping for authenticity, and authentic it is. What exactly does Haitian food entail? Yumminess, in the form of an assortment of seafood, poultry, meat dishes, stews, and soups. All entrées come with a red cabbage and iceberg salad (thousand island dressing comes in a ketchup squeeze bottle, Italian in a generic plastic bottle), slightly crunchy but flavorful black beans and rice, and two delightful little squashed plantain pancakes you can order fried or boiled.
The entrées themselves are amazing. Écrevisses Creole provided me with eight fairly large and oh-so-tender shrimp swimming with sautéed onions in a golden sauce just spicy enough to give an adequate flavor without necessitating excessive beverage consumption. The sauce, in fact, was so good that I not only rubbed my plantain pancakes in it, but also swirled my rice and beans around to sop up every remaining drop. Poisson Rose, or red snapper, is served whole, fried or with tomatoes in a similarly tangy Caribbean sauce; tassot cabrit offers deep-fried goat meat with a hot pineapple salsa in a little cup on the side for intense dipping.
The service was speedy and amiable and the prices were decent, but the size of the establishment doesn’t allow it to offer all of its items every day. I was hoping to try the dinde aux noix, “small turkey chunks cooked with cashew nuts,” but I guess I’ll have to come back some other time. Or I could always order in.
Be a little adventurous and try experimenting with a new take-out man; he just might bring an “I Heart NY” bag of Carribean-flavored sunshine. And did I mention they accept credit cards?
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