Ode to Africa Bite

No, this is not a restaurant whose name is also an imperative sentence. "Bite" is Kinyarwanda for, loosely, "What's up?" And Africa Bite is my favorite lunch joint in Kimihurura the neighborhood where I stay. You can slop as much food as you can carry, on a giant, thick clay plate, and get a Fanta for 3000 francs, or about $5. The good deal used to be great---it was 2500 francs (but the exchange rate was worse, so it wasn't all that far off today's USD price), and you got a little fruit salad at the end.

Nothing on that buffet can be approximated anywhere else in the world--not the little Rwandan eggplants, which are the color of jade and the size of a plumb and have a bitter edge; not the 'peanut sauce,' a lavender-colored stew made of ground nuts (that for some reason is out of this world if you drench a chapatti in it, but is totally unlike the ground nut stew I loved in Sierra Leone); not the igitoki, the savory warm bananas served from a huge clay pot. And definitely not the beans, which are something of a Rwandan specialty.

Take that, Betty Crocker.