The Spot: RAS Restaurant & Lounge, 4809 Georgia Avenue NW, (202) 291-2096

The Cuisine: Ethiopian, Caribbean, Jamaican

The Go-To Dishes: Bake and shark, gouda grits

The Scoop: About a month ago, I had stumbled across an article on Thrillist about a new place in Petworth called RAS. It's a Rastafarian/Ethiopian themed restaurant combining flavors from Africa and the Caribbean.

It recently came to my attention that, as part of RAS's menu, the joint serves a dish called bake and shark, which is deep-fried shark stuffed into fried bread and topped with lettuce, tomato, and mango chutney. Bake and shark is a Trinidadian dish, served from little huts on the island's beaches. So when I found out that I don't need to fly to the Caribbean to try it, I grabbed my coat and raced to RAS before Andrew Zimmern could beat me to it.

The bake and shark aside, RAS is actually a pretty cool joint itself. The place is still in the process of acquiring a liquor license, which will certainly help business at the built-in bar, not to mention the space for open mike and live reggae music. RAS was pretty empty when I walked in on a weekday evening, but my friendly waitress Mary informed me that the crowds differ by the day.

The only real problem was that I wanted to order more than just the bake and shark after checking out the menu. But Mary put my worries to rest and offered to make a combination plate of Jamaican jerk chicken along with Ethiopian lamb tibs on injera. I also asked for a side of gouda grits and a Jamaican ginger beer (though a Red Stripe would have been a way better option, alas).

Without any reservations, I can say that the bake and shark was everything I wanted and more. The deep-fried shark meat was full of flavor and the mango chutney served as the perfect complement. It becomes a bit of a mess toward the end, as the fried batter begins to fall apart, but it's just as good with a fork.

The other plates were either hit or miss. The lamb tibs were tasty, but nowhere near as juicy as those made by RAS's Ethiopian counterparts along 9th Street NW. The Jamaican jerk chicken seemed subpar, since it came with a container of jerk sauce on the side, which could have used a bit more kick. However, the gouda grits were absolutely excellent and made for a terrific side dish.

The Verdict: RAS is a great addition to a string of innovative new spots up along Georgia Avenue. The bake and shark is an absolute must and an interesting eat to say the least. But you can definitely find better Ethiopian and Jamaican options throughout the city.

The Spot: Sweet Mango Cafe, 3701 New Hampshire Ave. NW (202-726-2646)

The Cuisine: Jamaican, Caribbean

The Go-To Dishes: fried plantains, oxtail, jerk chicken

The Scoop: There are only a few things in this world that get me as excited as Jamaican food. I had been hearing about Reginald James' Sweet Mango Cafe for some time now, and when I got the chance to try it last Friday night, I pounced. I quickly assembled a team of three of my trusted companions to join me for dinner, not because I particularly enjoy their company but because I wanted to try everything on the menu.

Entering through the front entrance, located across the street from the Georgia Avenue Metro, we were met with a room full of takeout patrons waiting for their plantains and oxtails. My initial impression? Chaos. However, we quickly learned there was a sit-down section upstairs. Man, was I glad about that.

While there was a little outdoor balcony overlooking the Metro, the tables were full, so we settled on a spot inside, in a space clearly built for drinking and deejaying. For entrees, we decided on the goat curry, oxtail, red snapper, and jerk chicken (both white and dark meat), while for starters, we opted for the fried plantains, a beef patty, and a loaf of coco bread. To wash it down, I ordered a Jamaican soda, mostly out of curiosity, and the standard island lager, Red Stripe.

A few minutes later, a waiter arrived to tell us they were out of the red snapper, but to ease our pain, he presented us with an extra order of plantains on the house and offered to fry us up a piece of kingfish instead. Throughout the night, the waitstaff was extremely accommodating, courteous and attentive, and pretty damn funny, too.

It's safe to say those fried plantains rocked my world. They had a juicy texture and were perfectly sweet. The extra order did not go to waste. The beef patty, by contrast, seemed ordinary. Same for the coco bread. We could have skipped both and not lost any sleep it. But the plantains, we be jammin'!

As with the starters, the entrees arrived in Styrofoam takeout boxes. The aroma wafting from those containers put me in a drugged state of euphoria. I first started on the curry goat, which came with a side of rice. The meat was tender and the curry mild. It had good flavor, but I would have preferred more spice. The oxtail was especially tasty. I've had the pleasure of sampling a good deal of oxtail in my time, and this was quality stuff. The meat, however, was quite fatty, which meant it pretty much melted in my mouth. I was glad to share this with others, since it's not a dish I could eat by myself.

The kingfish was lightly fried and full of flavor, which led me to gnaw on the bones, trying to suck up every last bit. As good as the fish was, though, it paled next to the jerk chicken. You have an option of all white meat for an extra two bucks, which we tried, but I also asked for some dark meat on the side. The flavor was tremendous, with a spicy kick at the end. Nothing we tried, though, was too hot for our palates.

We must have looked like we couldn't handle heat, however. The waitstaff trotted out bottled water on the house for us to wash down all the food.

The Verdict: Go. Go now. Sweet Mango Cafe is not just a place that you should hit when in Petworth, it's a place that should be sought out.

The waiter informed me that my order of tikin xic grouper, the house specialty, would take 40 minutes to prepare. I looked over at Carrie for some guidance. It was, after all, our penultimate day of vacation, and I wasn't sure we wanted to spend 40 minutes of it waiting for grilled fish at this beach-side lunch spot on Isla Mujeres.

Then we came to our senses. I mean, what more did we need than Caribbean waters at our feet, cold drinks under a palapa, and the smell of grilled fish in the distance? I waded into the Bahia de Mujeres, beer in hand, to pass the time. I tried to ignore all the goddamn seaweed that threatened to dispell my island fantasy.

When I got bored of that, I popped my head into the kitchen to get a first-hand look at how the cooks prepare this Mayan fish speciality. The kitchen is located under a giant palapa and totally inaccessible to tourists and nosy food writers. The only way for me to sneak a peek at the stoves was to stick my head through a small window, which I did. I couldn't see much other than fish frying in a cast-iron skillet, which is not the way tikin xic is supposed to be prepared. I was bracing for disappointment.

Then the grouper arrived, this hulking, Jagger-lipped specimen so common to the warm waters of the Caribbean. Scaled and gutted, the grouper was butterflied to reveal its scored flesh, which was tinted the most mouthwatering shades of orange and red, the result of its lengthy marinade in achiote paste and citrus juices. Just as important to me, the flesh was freckled with char, these little blackened sections that told me, without question, the grouper had been grilled in a banana leaf, not pan-fried. 

Despite its run-in with the high-heat of the grill, this fish was still swimming in its own juices, which pooled at the bottom of the grouper, where flesh meets skin. I don't ever recall seeing so much juice in a grilled fish. The flavor was far more subtle than I expected from such a vibrant preparation. It wasn't spicy. It wasn't sour. It was...fresh. It was smokey. It was salty. And yet, it also hinted at something wilder underneath.

I greedily ripped out sections of meat and wrapped them in a fresh corn tortilla, along with some strands of cabbage, rice, and a lean application of the tongue-searing habanero sauce, which our waiter brought to the table.  If there was a better way to spend the afternoon on vacation, I couldn't think of it right then.

When the discussion turns to ethnic eats in the D.C. area, Caribbean and/or Jamaican cuisine often gets the shaft. It’s always Ethiopian this, Vietnamese that. The fact is, the District and surrounding areas are crawling with quality Caribbean joints, whether Caribbean Palace, the outstanding Trinidadian takeout in Takoma Park, or the Junction International Market and Jerk Center in Chillum. The sole reason to step foot into Junction is for its jerk chicken; your Styrofoam clamshell comes stuffed with grilled, gorgeously charred bird parts drizzled with the darkest, pepper-flecked sauce you’ll ever lay eyes on. The sauce’s sweetness is, in part, derived from caramel, which helps defuse the fowl’s search-and-destroy level of heat. This is jerk chicken for those who want more than a cosmic burn.

 Junction International Market and Jerk Center. 900 Chillum Road, Chillum, (301) 853-0193

Commercial mauby, with carbonation

Until I stepped foot into Taste of Caribbean 2 yesterday, I had only known the place as the unfortunate player in the tug of war over the former Teddy's Roti Shop space on Georgia Avenue NW. ToC2 has managed to survive, if not thrive, in the year or so since it opened a second store in that contested space, which, ironically, is now just up the avenue from the relocated Teddy's.

Personally, after tasting ToC2's dense and chewy "boneless" chicken curry roti (complete with bones), I'd choose Teddy's version any day of the week. But I did spot something in the cooler that captured my attention. It was a housemade drink in a cylindrical plastic container. A single word was handwritten on a piece of tape affixed to the container: "mauby." I asked the lone employee at Taste of Caribbean 2 what "mauby" was.

She stared blankly at me for a second. I got the feeling she thought I was an idiot for asking. She then explained that mauby was a bark or a fruit, she couldn't remember exactly. But she warned me that the drink was bitter. I told her that I liked bitter flavors, which did not increase her enthusiasm for selling me the drink. That's when I finally picked up on the vibe.

"You don't like the drink?" I asked.

She shook her head. I was impressed with her honesty, if not her salesmanship. I bought the drink anyway.

Mauby, it turns out, is not a bark or a fruit, but a drink typically made from the bark and/or fruit of a tree that grows in the northern Caribbean and south Florida. It can either be carbonated or not. The ToC2's version was non-carbonated, apparently made with just mauby syrup, water, and perhaps an added spice or two.

I immediately opened the container while waiting for my roti and took a sip. A sticky sweetness coated my tongue at first, but within moments, the bitterness kicked in. This was root beer that had gone off the reservation. Its bitterness was quite strong, but not unpleasant, particularly if your palate has grown accustomed to all those hop-monster beers on the market.

I would have happily sucked down this taste of the Caribbean, if not for the unfortunate pairing with my roti. Somehow, someway, when you take a sip of mauby after a bite of chicken curry, the bitterness factor increases by a ratio of 1,000. (Note: not scientifically measured.) I had to decide pretty quickly which one I was going to keep consuming and which one I was going to toss.

It was an easy decision really. The roti quickly found a home in the trash can.

It's been a rough year or so for David Nagar, co-owner of Teddy's Roti Shop. The tiny Trinidadian take out, which serves a killer roti and buss-up-shut, had been searching for a permanent home ever since his landlord refused to renew his lease back in the fall of 2007. Nagar first tried to relocate to Silver Spring, across from the Metro station, but that place was a bust. Now he's found a home at 7304 Georgia Ave NW—not far, in fact, from the spot where Teddy's spent the first 14 years of its life.

I stopped by his new place on Inauguration Day for a quiet lunch, but once Nagar recognized me from our previous conversations, that was out of the question. He was still angry about the things that I let other people say about him. He was angry that I didn't return his three phone calls. (I told him I never got his three calls.) He was lobbying me to come back the next day, when he wasn't as busy, so he could presumably take me to task for other matters. I stood there and mostly listened. Arguing with Nagar would only delay my lunch.

Whatever you think about Nagar, the guy knows how to make a terrific flatbread. I ordered the beef buss-up-shut; the curry stew, with its generous portions of channa and meaty chunks of beef, came in a separate container from the twisted and gnarled paratha bread (which gives buss-up-shut its name, since it resembles a busted-up shirt). I greedily broke off pieces of the flaky wheat bread, made rich with (the horror!) Crisco, and scooped up one bite after another after another until I could eat no more of the stew. Its flavors were almost impossible to parse, an earthy, satisfying mix of curry spices that was not spicy at all. Nagar's little plastic container of hot sauce, spiked with tamarind, provided the heat. Just a touch of that stuff and your mouth went nuclear.

My dining companion ordered the boneless chicken roti, and it was the equal of the buss-up-shut. The light curry flavors seemed identical to those in my buss-up-shut; the semi-dry chunks of chicken breast and the chickpea-based roti, with its slight vegetal flavor, provided most of the contrast. I washed down this gut-busting lunch with Teddy's homemade ginger-pineapple drink, which was the perfect counterpoint to the hearty meal—fruity, spicy, and sweet.

All in all, it was a meal worth getting fussed at.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery