Last weekend, I had the pleasure of hanging out with my friends Nionne and Seth in Richmond Hill / Ozone Park to chomp on Guyanese food, specifically, Guyanese-Chinese and baked goods.
When Nionne, a former colleague, recently posted on Facebook that she was enjoying Ovaltine with tennis rolls with cheese, I was intrigued, trying to imagine, rather than doing an immediate search on the interwebs, what a tennis roll could possibly be. With an ulterior motive in mind - Nionne had taken me to eat Guyanese-Chinese twice before at Hibiscus Restaurant and Bar, and I'd developed an intense liking for their fried rice dishes - I asked her what tennis rolls were, and she offered to take me for a visit to Richmond Hill, hitting up Hibiscus along with a trip to a Guyanese bakery. Yes!
This intersected nicely with some plans I was making for another eating outing with my friend Seth, whom I've known since my college years. Seth has been living in NYC for maybe less than two years and, as a historian, amateur sociologist, and generally inquisitive person (altogether, a smart person who is not a smartypants), has already learned a helluva lot about the city's neighborhoods, peoples, patterns of habitation, and foodways. In short, he's one of the few non-annoying chowhoundy folks I know willing to travel across boroughs for food. We'd been trying to figure out where to eat next (he'd nixed a previous suggestion to try the Iraqi hot dog at a Colombian place in Elmhurst) when the opportunity for Guyanese-Chinese came up. His response when I asked if he'd be up for it was, "Would I be up for it? WOULD I BE UP FOR IT? I am GEEKED!"
Okay, so with this lengthy preface out of the way and our cast of characters established, here's the food:
My pick: Fried rice with chicken. Magically delicious!
Seth's pick: Chow mein with lapchong (Chinese sausage)
I didn't take a picture of Nionne's choice - the fried rice with everything (lapchong, shrimp, chicken) - as I think I was already tunnelling into my tower of food. Once again, I can't actually describe or define what made my dish so delicious, or what the specific variation Guyanese contributed to hyphenate the Chinese element of the fried rice. I can say that the chicken, both dark and white meat, was perfectly cooked: a crisp yet slightly chewy skin, that difficult combination of textures to achieve; somehow scarcely a trace of fat or greasiness; and very moist and tender flesh left on the bone. I couldn't identify the sauce drizzled on top of the chicken - not XO sauce or oyster sauce, but something like those yet not as salty and not sweet. Small bits of the green bean-like bora, which I thought looked like Chinese long beans (only to discover while doing some lite background research for this blog that they're - gasp! - actually one and the same vegetable) brought a welcome crunch and slight trace of bitterness and chlorophyll to the rich dish. I highly recommend adding hot pepper sauce, which is similar to this brand of Thai Sriracha hot sauce, to the fried rice and chicken for even more flavor complexity and happiness. (Speaking of Thai hot sauce, I felt like this dish was something my mom and her side of the family would really like, as it does remind me of Thai versions of fried rice, including the slice of cucumber on top.)
After polishing off lunch and wrapping up the leftovers - portion sizes here were enormous - we decided to walk over to Little Guyana Bake Shop to find those tennis rolls, and to aid with digestion. We made a detour to check out Warung Kario, a Surinamese restaurant that's on our to-do / to-eat list; we'll need to do some homework before then, as none of us could translate the menu. The stroll down lively Liberty Avenue on a sunny day, punctuated with stops in grocery and seafood stores to figure out what banga mary fish looks like and how much Ovaltine costs, provided a nice diversion from my impending sense of doom from not having gotten any work done over the weekend.
Once at the bakery, Seth got an super red sweet that looked of Asian Indian provenance, and Nionne picked up some tennis rolls and other items. I mooched a tennis roll off Nionne and bought a bottle of mauby, which I'd never tried before - unfortunately, I didn't develop a liking for mauby, which tasted bark-y (well, it is made from bark), slightly medicinal, a bit too sugary, and bitter; I'm willing to give it another try, as maybe it was the specific formulation/brand of the drink that I didn't enjoy and not the type of drink itself.
As for the tennis roll, even though it didn't come hot out of the oven, it tasted lovely. I'm not a big fan of breads or sweets, so it boded well when my first bit led me to want to continue eating. I had done a slight bit of reading up on tennis rolls so couldn't take credit for identifying the lemon and orange flavors in the bread (from the zest that goes into the batter). The tennis roll reminded me a little bit of Portugese sweet bread, but less dense and less sweet. I ate a few bites but was still too full from lunch; I saved the rest for breakfast the next morning. Slightly toasting it didn't make it any better and detracted from the texture, adding butter was good, but next time I'm going to 1) try it with cheese, as I can see how that'd work nicely and 2) with a little sweetened condensed milk, to be decadent.
Whew! I feel full and happy just reliving this. If anyone wants to replicate this meal, take the A train to Lefferts Boulevard to get to these places, and let me know if you're going so I can join up with you.

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