Most of Patisserie des Ambassades‘ (2200 8th Ave, New York, NY 10026) menu seems more West African than Comorian, and indeed, the African community in Harlem tends to come primarily from Senegal.  So in the end, we didn’t find a Comorian restaurant.  I wouldn’t even necessarily claim that we  found an authentic Comorian dish, but we did find an African restaurant with a nominally Comorian dish.  I’m going to give us a half point.

The Ambassades’ Comoros Curry is a mild, but flavorful Indian-style vegetable curry served with rice.  Comoros’ location in the Mozambique Channel meant it was an important stopping point for sea merchants making their way to and from India, and Indian influenced cuisine is prevalent there.  We ordered one curry between the three of us, and it was a nice side to our main dishes. read more »

There are apparently 33 countries with smaller populations than Comoros.  Many of them are still ahead of us.  We were able to find four of them: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, and Cape Verde.  After good-faith efforts, we ended up cooking two at home: Andorra and Bahamas.  Now, for the first time since we started this project, we threw our hands up and resigned ourselves to cooking at home before we even (extensively) Googled Comoros.  Pretty pathetic, right?

We picked a night, spent a couple hours trying to find an authentic Comorian recipe, found many of very dubious provenance, then switched to Googling in French, finally found someone’s Comorian grandmother’s nice-looking lamb stew recipe on a Comorian forum, and headed out to grab what we needed.  We live in a Bangladeshi neighborhood, so there’s no shortage of halal butchers.  We walked into the first one we saw.  As you might expect, the shelves were fully stocked with Goya products and corn tortillas, and a youngish Mexican kid stood in a bloody smock under an airbrushed painting of Mecca. read more »