MY LITTLEST LITTLE sister Orange Pop lives in Cleveland. She's a theater person, technically speaking, stage lighting being her area of expertise. You gotta figure she's good at what she does, if for no other reason than because she's my sister.

Well, she's been off-seasoning out here in San Francisco, and unless someone blindsides her with some kind of theatrical gig, odds are she'll be riding off into the sunrise come fall, lighting up Lake Erie. Some living.

But the point I wanted to make was that in however many years she's been living in Cleveland ($400 2BR apt. btw), she's never once been to the Jake to see the Indians play ... which, what's the point of living in Cleveland, $400 2BR apts. notwithstanding?

So recently when the Tribe swung through Oakland (and swung through Oakland pitching, I might add), I took her to a couple of those games. After one of them we BART-hopped back to the city via Happy Day Caribbean and Nigerian Kitchen, on Telegraph at 17th Street in Oakland.

You know I'm a Caribbophile, right? Mostly it's the music that floats me bowl. Boat. And I don't mean reggae so much as calypso, but given a choice between reggae and, say, rock ... gimme reggae.

It's a hard place to write about, Happy Day, for one thing because it wasn't such a happy day, and I don't only mean for Indians fans. There was something wrong with the world. Don't know what it was, exactly, but the two folks working there looked like they had just about had it. The guy at the end of the counter was facedown into his folded arms on a pile of mail, and the woman dishing up our Styrofoam containers of food seemed similarly somniferous. I'm not knocking them. I myself was feeling several sails short of a sailboat all day that day. I'd fallen asleep on Muni on the way to BART, missed my stop, and then fell asleep again on BART and would have missed the Coliseum if Orange Pop hadn't've been there to shake me. I nodded off once or twice during the game, too – a first for me. There was just something about the day, I'm telling you. Something that no amount of hot dogs or sausages and garlic fries, not to mention jerk chicken over rice and beans, spinach, and potatoes, was going to fix. Even just writing about it makes me need a nap.

If you'll excuse me, please, for 20 minutes ...

Four hours later: Where was I? Happy Day, formerly Ma's Caribbean Cuisine and Roti, just a teeny tiny speck of a place, mostly geared toward takeout. There is a little counter with four or five or six stools in the back, and that's where me and Orange Pop sat. They didn't have any orange pop, so Orange Pop had to order a root beer, except that I'd already asked for a root beer, and they only had one of them, turns out, so then she had to drink Dr. Pepper, poor kid.

For food, for her, there was "the vegetarian choice," which is all vegetarians deserve, you ask me, is just one choice. This one was rice, beans, spinach – same as what comes with my jerk chicken meal, but also curry potatoes and fried plantains. Seven bucks. Same as the jerk chicken.

The chicken was pretty good and very spicy. Very, very spicy. I needed all my spinach and rice and a lot of Orange Pop's plantains to offset the heat. I needed root beer. I needed water. I needed so many things, and the kick of it was that I was never really all that hungry to start with, so that afterwards I felt like, without vigilance, everything might just come dribbling out my nose. I was topped off.

Next time I might try some of the other fun-sounding stuff, like Nigerian-style pepper soup, pounded yam, or fried stew. Fried stew.

Fried stew.

Roti. Roti are like burritos. At least they look like burritos, big square ones full of a lot of the same stuff: curry potatoes, spinach, and meat. Besides chicken they have goat, beef, and lamb.

Now, I personally wouldn't call none of this stuff "cuisine," seeing as how it all seems to be preprepared and sitting around in pots, as opposed to made-to-order. And maybe that's why they went from being Ma's blah blah blah Cuisine to Happy Day blah blah blah Kitchen. You know me: I like kitchens better than cuisines anyway. That's comfort food, when it comes out of a kitchen, when it comes out of a pot on the stove. That's stewed stuff. Fried and stewed. Comfort food. Tucks you in, in other words; sings you to sleep. As it says in the window: Enjoy you meal!

Happy Day Caribbean and Nigerian Kitchen. 1711 Telegraph (at 17th St.), Oakl. (510) 444-7684. Mon.-Sat., 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Takeout available. No alcohol. Credit cards not accepted. Wheelchair accessible.