Wayway away

I'M WRITING TO you from the Brazil Café, corner of University at Walnut in Berkeley. It's a funny, funky, and colorful outdoor add-on sidewalk construction of bamboo, picket fence, hanging tablecloth curtains, flowers, photos, old old Astroturf, and very pleasant smells. Something's cooking in the little hut/shack/shanty at the center of this yeehaw. Me, I'm waiting for Wayway, who's going away this weekend to China for most of the rest of the summer. Bye-bye, Wayway.

Thanks for turning me on to the Brazil Café. I haven't even eaten yet, haven't seen anyone, haven't figured out where the kitchen is, or where a window is to order at ... there's some question in my mind as to whether or not the place is even open – but I'm sitting in it, at it, and I love it and I'm going to give it a glowing review.

For one thing: It's a beautiful day. Tribe swept the Giants, there are four kinds of hot sauce on the table I'm sitting at. I'm sitting outside, beautiful day, like I said. This all makes me happy. Makes me hungry. All kinds of great-sounding things on the chaotic cluster of menu boards out front. I think I'm going to go for the famous tri-tip sandwich with a mango smoothie. If this is for real. If they're really open. Maybe they open at 11. It's 10 till.

It's 11.

Hello, Wayway! Here he comes now. He'll know. He's wearing a green shirt.

"Hey, man, what's up here?" I say. "They open?"

"I don't know," he says.

I've already walked around the little kiosk two or three times, looking for an opening or entrance. Wayway finds it, knocks on a wooden post, and asks. They don't open until 11:30.

I'm writing to you from Tropical Paradise Restaurant, a couple blocks away on University. This is the one I tried to find two weeks ago when I wound up finding Dara instead. Tropical Paradise exists. You just have to keep walking. It says something on the window about Caribbean food, which is what initially caught Wayway's eye and my ear, but actually their specialty is Ghanaian food. That means fufu, kenkey, chichinga, and other nice-sounding things. But it also means 12 bucks, 13 bucks, 10 bucks ... and I'll be damned if I'm paying foofy prices for fufu. Or chichi prices for chichinga.

And I'll stop right there, not out of any sense of decency but because I can't think of anything to go with kenkey. Anyway, I'm a Caribbaphile, not a Ghanaphile, so I got the jerk chicken lunch special ($5.50). It's just a skewer of jerk chicken served with rice, spinach stew, salad, and maybe the best fried plantains I've ever had. They season them with ginger and other stuff, and fry them in soybean oil. But I don't know why they're so good. Every time I get fried plantains they're always not-as-good as they seem like they should be. This time they were better. Maybe it's the ginger.

The rice, jollof rice, meaning cooked with tomatoes, bay leaf, anise, and nutmeg, was also very good, and very necessary to calm down the chicken, which was too salty. Mixed in with the rice – maybe a little tiny bit of calypso sauce (scotch bonnet peppers), if you like – it was just right.

And the spinach was great.

Wayway, ever the adventurer, splurged for the chicken chichinga. Actually, if you get thigh meat instead of breast meat, it's only $7.50 instead of $9.50, and that's entirely reasonable factoring in all the other stuff: the rice, the plantains, salad, and a choice between spinach and black-eyed peas. Wayway lucked out because he asked for black-eyed peas, got spinach by accident, and of course wound up with both.

I tasted his black-eyed peas. Very good.

I did not taste the chichinga. It's skewers of chicken (or beef) marinated in mustard, lemon juice, ginger juice, and garlic. I'm not a big mustard fan, but it sounds good anyway, doesn't it? It looked good.

I'm writing to you from my shack in Sonoma County, beautiful day. I don't know what Wayway's chichinga tasted like. I don't know what fufu is. I don't know what kenkey is. I don't know what my name is, and I don't know a number of other things. But I do know this: There's a hammock outside my door, between redwood trees, calling me ...

"Exister!"

Tropical Paradise Restaurant. 2021 University (at Milvia), Berk. (510) 665-4380. Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sat., 5 p.m.-midnight. Beer and wine. Takeout available. MasterCard, Visa. Wheelchair accessible.