De Bamboo Express
772 Flatbush Ave., between Clarkson and Lenox
718-469-0117
Guyanese
food is one of the world's great stoner cuisines. Wait, sorry, there's a
more diplomatic way to put that. You could say that Guyana, the south
american country parked east of Venezuela and north of Brazil, hosts a
population spiced with the usual Merrie Olde English colonials -- East
Asians, Chinese, Africans, and Amerindians -- plus Caribbean neighbors,
making for a transnational cookery of varied influences. Or you could
say: jerk-chicken lo mein. The fellas at De Bamboo Express will happily
mash-up any number of cuisines for your meal. Order up some vintage
American-style Cantonese Chinese dishes -- your chow meins, your pepper
steak -- the sauces thick with corn starch. Add a fried fish, or shrimp,
or chicken. Or jerk anything you like -- chicken, lamb, even pig -- or,
on second thought, curry it and serve over a mound of fluffy white
rice. Or rice and pigeon peas. Or buttery roti. Or some of those
precious British pastries -- tennis rolls, anyone? The enormous menu
lists all of these options, and some more that you never thought of.
What's good? Everything arrives in a steamy cloud of spice, not a little
grease, and in robust proportions. The red snapper, awash in saffron
curry, stands out, along with that jerk lamb, and no one puts a noodle
to better use anywhere in the Caribbean. The price you'll pay for all
this deliciousness is temporal. Like most of our Lefferts gems, they
don't deliver, and even if you call your order in, it seems like it's
just getting started when you go to pick up. Pay no mind -- more time to
drool over the pastry case and plot your plan of attack for next time.
Curry goat plus General Tso's chicken plus jerk snapper? Dude...that
sounds awesome. - Mark le Snob
5 comments:
Although it seems to me that what I call lo mein they call chow mein - which ever, jerk chicken lo mein (or chow mein as it's called here) is exceptional!
Naomi Campbell, BTW, is Jamaican-Chinese, which is really where this cuisine is from, regardless of these particular owners' origins.
Just an FYI, Jamaica is not "...where this cuisine is from" in the Caribbean.
Most of the Chinese, as well as East Indian, indentured servants that were brought to the Caribbean in the 19th century ended up in Guyana (then British Guiana) and Trinidad. And although many Ethnic Chinese laborers were brought directly to Jamaica from China, most Ethnic Chinese in Jamaica ended up via Guyana or Trinidad when the coffee plantation owners became more concerned about the slave uprisings in the early part of the century.
This sounds fantastic - I'm on a mission to try everything you write about and generally everything in this neighborhood! I'm definitely going to stop at the places you've recommended. --PLGourmand
Thanks for the clarification, Duane. I got my info from an older article, which I guess wasn't completely correct: http://appetiteforchina.com/recipes/new-york/brooklyn/restaurants/de-bamboo-express-chinese-jamaican-restaurant.
http://www.chinatownstories.com/de-bamboo-express/
And the NY Times said the same thing even before that: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/dining/21chin.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
I do believe jerk chicken is quintessentially Jamaican, however.
Jerk is definitely a Jamaican thing. And they do it very well!
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