| It’s Carifest time in Calgary (the festival runs until Saturday, June 12) and I was walking down the Stephen Avenue Mall last Friday when the scent of cumin and allspice and, above all, hot peppers, wafted by. The weather was glorious and there, lined up in a fragrant row, were booths from Calgary’s Caribbean restaurants: Legends, the Blue Lagoon and my current favourite, Sherry’s Caribbean Food (it’s located in a strip mall at 7640 Fairmount Drive S.E., phone 259-2527).
Sherry’s is a small, inexpensive and homey sort of place – it feels like the kind of place you’d hope to happen upon having made a wrong turn in Montego Bay. The décor is utilitarian (there’s a chest freezer full of good stuff near the entrance for example), and the menu is written on a big chalkboard. There’s a communal Calgary Sun on an old bookshelf for anyone who wants to read it and Sherry herself is at the stove and brings you the food. She has a voluble and attractive personality, but even if she were cranky and bad-tempered I’d still go there because the food’s really good.
Now I admit that Caribbean food hasn’t always been my thing. Often you order jerk chicken and it’s terribly overcooked and dry, and many Jamaican patties seem to come from the same processing plant. But Sherry’s has opened my eyes. It’s peasant food of high quality, where inexpensive cuts of meat are cooked for a long time in an aromatic broth, which makes everything dark and intoxicating.
A word about the food at Sherry’s: there’s tons of it. I recently ordered the chicken roti ($12.50), a thin wrap not dissimilar to a flour tortilla but flakier, stuffed to bursting with a spicy blend of chicken, vegetables and aromatics. I’ve eaten lots of roti in the past, and this was by far the best. Sherry will also crank up the heat if you want, so the roti has an undertone of nastiness. It comes with a rice-and-red-bean salad and a green salad as well, and the former also was scented with spices. I was hungry, but I still had a third of the roti left over for the next day.
The brown stew chicken ($8.95), that day’s special, was rich and dark with allspice and cloves. It’s a chicken stew that can stand on its own alongside other stewed chicken dishes, coq au vin and chicken cacciatore. I almost prefer Sherry’s brown stew, because of its slight sweetness. The jerk pork ($8.50) – which looked to be pork shoulder – was not overcooked, so it was still juicy and tender, and had some heat. These dishes also come with red-beans-and-rice salad.
There are also the usual Caribbean specialties, curried goat ($13.95) and oxtail ($10.95). You can wash it all down with a Jamaican-style ginger beer and be incredibly happy. So far, Sherry’s is 2004’s undiscovered Calgary restaurant of the year. It’s open Monday to Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. And Sherry does takeout, too – jerk chicken rolls, cocoa bread, jerk wings… it’s making my eyes water just thinking about it.
IT’S CHERRY SEASON
Finally. In the Home Depot parking lots and in vacant lots around town, the vans have started to show up from Washington state, and soon we’ll see the ones from B.C., and it’s about time. At this time of year, I always gorge myself on cherries, because once the season is over, that’s it. There ain’t no imported Chilean cherries. One tip: if you have to pit cherries (to feed them to little kids for example), the Jolle Chef (457 42nd Ave. S.E.) has an excellent cherry pitter, and if you’re pitting cherries, do it inside a Ziploc bag. That way, you don’t get cherry juice all over everything (that cooking tip stolen shamelessly from Taunton’s Fine Cooking). |
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.