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Friday night at the Oasis
Friday night I took shelter in numbers and discharged an outstanding obligation to colleague. Ever since a Senegalese coworker reopened his restaurant, I've been promising to come visit. I like him, I like Senegalese food, but I really really dislike being kept up all night with killer reflux from eating spicy food late, so I've been waiting for a weekend where I didn't have much going on. This turned out to be that weekend, and as a bonus I was able to tag along with a gang of work buddies. All in all, this visit was very reminiscent of the last except that the food was better and the service, incredibly, much worse. To his credit, our friend tried to get us to order dishes ahead of time so he could get a jump on preparing them, but we misunderstood how to do this and didn't. His sole waitress (and girlfriend?) largely ignored our table; I was going to order some tea, but I was lucky to get water, and that after nearly an hour of being seated. Pretty much everyone else was drinking the bear, wine, and whiskey they'd brought, which made them good diverting company, but also less focused than me on actually getting an order together.
Happily, they were all open to eating family-style. I was looking forward to sampling a wide array of dishes, but in the end we had only five. The appetiser course (arriving at the one-and-a-half-hour mark) was a sampling of pastels, deep-fried pastries with fillings of chicken, fish, and vegetables. About a half-hour later, we had a rather bland vegetable medley "in honour of the [sole] vegetarian". Then another long pause before the yassa au poulet, chicken braised in a spicy mustard-garlic sauce with plenty of grilled onions (we'd been given steamed rice to eat with it, but I was the only one with any left by the time the dish arrived, and then only because I'd literally been nibbling it one grain at a time) and a bland salad notable only for the presence of a squash-like vegetable no one could identify. At this point, it was nearly nine o'clock, and I told myself I wasn't going to have a bite more, despite feeling far from sated. But I gave in at the sight of the mountain of chicken curry that arrived some time later, and was only a little sorry to find it lacking the terrific juiciness of the yassa.
I can't fault my friend's culinary skills, but there are obvious limitations to being the sole chef and cooking everything to order. Besides the nine of us, they served only eight other diners during the four hours we were there. Even with a small salary pool, how can you turn a profit with only four covers an hour on what should be your busiest night? I should've been charmed by the way he would come out and sit with us each time to discuss what the next course would be, but all I really wanted was for him to get back into the kitchen and cook us some damn food, any kind of food. So I'm glad I made it over during what I suspect will be the relatively brief window that the restaurant will be open. And I know he must've been pleased, too, because he remembers my previous visit so well that he knows exactly what I ate (maafe) and mentioned this several times.
Naturally, not everyone was ready to go home when the dinner party broke up around ten, so at the instigation of a Tennessean grad student cum security guard I'll call "Rocky Top", we ended up at the Oasis, Rogers Park's most celebrated surviving dive bar. My total exposure to it heretofore consisted of using the wreck of a restroom, which is shared with the little Korean-run sushi bar next door. I can certainly see the attraction to Rocky Top, a would-be novelist, but it's a bit much to take sober. An hour or so of trying to avoid eye contact with the William H. Macy hangdog face of the middle-aged man across from us was enough for me, so I promised them cocktails chez nous to make up for failing to buy a round and slunk home.
Happily, they were all open to eating family-style. I was looking forward to sampling a wide array of dishes, but in the end we had only five. The appetiser course (arriving at the one-and-a-half-hour mark) was a sampling of pastels, deep-fried pastries with fillings of chicken, fish, and vegetables. About a half-hour later, we had a rather bland vegetable medley "in honour of the [sole] vegetarian". Then another long pause before the yassa au poulet, chicken braised in a spicy mustard-garlic sauce with plenty of grilled onions (we'd been given steamed rice to eat with it, but I was the only one with any left by the time the dish arrived, and then only because I'd literally been nibbling it one grain at a time) and a bland salad notable only for the presence of a squash-like vegetable no one could identify. At this point, it was nearly nine o'clock, and I told myself I wasn't going to have a bite more, despite feeling far from sated. But I gave in at the sight of the mountain of chicken curry that arrived some time later, and was only a little sorry to find it lacking the terrific juiciness of the yassa.
I can't fault my friend's culinary skills, but there are obvious limitations to being the sole chef and cooking everything to order. Besides the nine of us, they served only eight other diners during the four hours we were there. Even with a small salary pool, how can you turn a profit with only four covers an hour on what should be your busiest night? I should've been charmed by the way he would come out and sit with us each time to discuss what the next course would be, but all I really wanted was for him to get back into the kitchen and cook us some damn food, any kind of food. So I'm glad I made it over during what I suspect will be the relatively brief window that the restaurant will be open. And I know he must've been pleased, too, because he remembers my previous visit so well that he knows exactly what I ate (maafe) and mentioned this several times.
Naturally, not everyone was ready to go home when the dinner party broke up around ten, so at the instigation of a Tennessean grad student cum security guard I'll call "Rocky Top", we ended up at the Oasis, Rogers Park's most celebrated surviving dive bar. My total exposure to it heretofore consisted of using the wreck of a restroom, which is shared with the little Korean-run sushi bar next door. I can certainly see the attraction to Rocky Top, a would-be novelist, but it's a bit much to take sober. An hour or so of trying to avoid eye contact with the William H. Macy hangdog face of the middle-aged man across from us was enough for me, so I promised them cocktails chez nous to make up for failing to buy a round and slunk home.