Café Rue Dix
CreditPeter Bagi for The New York Times
The first Senegalese dish I ate at Café Rue Dix looked a lot like Vietnamese spring rolls: pale, crackly bundles with bubbled bits of rice paper shearing off, backed by frills of kale. They came with a dark dipping sauce as vinegary and lime-bright as nuoc cham.
It turned out to be a family resemblance. The rolls were taken to West Africa by the Vietnamese wives of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, French colonial recruits who served in the Indochina War of the 1940s and ’50s. At Café Rue Dix, which opened last summer in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the rolls are made as they are in Dakar, with a Senegalese twist: The meat’s flavor is boosted by guedj, a dried fermented fish that outfunks Southeast Asian fish sauce.
The rolls were followed by fataya, flaky meat pies that can be traced back to Dakar’s longstanding African-Lebanese community. But the accompanying sauce was all Senegalese Scotch bonnets, whose heat does not crescendo but simply erupts. One overambitious dab, and I couldn’t eat for several minutes. Then I wanted more.
There are gentler starts: hummus, green with parsley; fried calamari; a disc of bucheron, grilled halfway to melting, atop mesclun and beets; not one but two kale salads. These are dishes of the world, the kind you may find at a bistro in its broadest, most generous definition. And that is what Café Rue Dix rather effortlessly is — a restaurant firmly of the neighborhood but cosmopolitan in outlook, mixing plates of moules frites and thiebou djeun, spinning Edith Piaf between griot rap and mbalax, current Senegalese music styles.
The married owners, Lamine Diagne and Nilea Alexander, live nearby in a brownstone once owned by Ms. Alexander’s great-uncle. Mr. Diagne grew up in Dakar, on Rue 10 (hence the restaurant’s name), and borrowed his mother’s recipe for the Scotch bonnet sauce. Ms. Alexander, a native of Atlanta, works in fashion and helped design the appealing space, with geometric patterns reminiscent of Senegalese textiles and lamps made from gutted shekeres (gourd drums studded with cowrie shells).
The chef Ramon Ramirez oversees the European side of the menu, including satisfying every-night fare like salmon Provençal propped up by olive-flecked mashed potatoes; a clutter of mussels; rib-eye having it both ways, with chimichurri and Roquefort sauce. The burger got nods around my table, as did the fries, particularly when that Scotch bonnet sauce is delicately applied.
The Senegalese dishes, prepared by Khady Diba, tend to be dramatic heaps of meat and rice. Best among them is mafe, a thick, clingy stew of beef, tomato and peanuts ground into butter, sweet and earthy. Thiebou djeun, red snapper slow-cooked with rice and giant vegetables — a whole, rugged carrot and broken pillars of cassava — messily evokes paella.
Elsewhere, I missed color and some of the more intense sweet-sour flavors that Senegalese cuisine is known for. Lamb chops dibi-style demanded strong teeth and had little leavening on the plate beyond an overlay of onion confit and plantains sweated just enough to let the sugars out. A fine, lemony half-poussin arrived, confusingly, with the traditional yassa sauce of long-cooked onions and peppers in a large bowl on the side, as if the kitchen had become shy at the last minute.
On Wednesday nights, there’s a $29 three-course, all-Senegalese prix fixe, but mixing and matching different cuisines seems more in keeping with the mood of the restaurant. So take your profiteroles and chase them with Café Touba, the coffee sold at street stalls across Dakar. It’s made from beans ground with djar, a musky black pepper, and typically overdosed with sugar, although not here: instead, the bitterness is rounded out with a shot of espresso and steamed milk.
Or slow everything down and end with attaya, Chinese gunpowder green tea steeped with fresh mint and a flick of sugar. In Senegal, it is poured back and forth between glasses from a height, to create “mousse” (froth). You are meant to drink at least three glasses. First it is bitter, then perfect, and finally nothing but sweet. You stay, with the glass doors swung open and the warm night continuing, for as long as it takes.