My African journey began, unexpectedly, in a Center City parking garage. I overheard the banter of French behind the register, where the attendants' conversation had turned to lunch. Of course, I couldn't help butting in.
So where was the best West African cooking in Philly, I wondered. A little fufu or jollof rice, perhaps a spicy mafe peanut and mutton stew? They gave me a startled look, then the cashier gushed: "Oh, there are soooo many! Just go to Woodland Avenue!"
So I left the garage with my car - and a couple of new addresses scribbled on a receipt. The next day, I headed with my colleague and fellow fufu fiend, Rick Nichols, on a quest to the great Southwest, a neighborhood where I hadn't spent nearly enough quality eating time. We turned left from Gray's Ferry onto Woodland Avenue, and a world of diverse storefronts unfurled - Caribbean, Vietnamese, a rib shack, and yes, numerous African eateries.
Should we go for grilled Cote d'Ivoire lamb dibi at Le Baobab? Potato greens at the African music cafe Le Mandingue? I'd heard a good word about the Senegalese fried fish at Touba Teranga, but it was closed. We needed some expert guidance, and Rick found it by following the heady aroma of smoked pike into the Mosel International Market, where the owner decisively sent us several blocks off Woodland entirely: "I go to Memdee's for my African food."
Tucked deep in the residential heart of Elmwood at 68th and Guyer, Memdee's is the kind of restaurant even the most dedicated food tourist might never find. But I'll count us among the lucky. After dipping into a powerfully soulful bowl of a starchy orb of fufu and soup, it was clear that this Liberian kitchen produces flavors worth seeking out.
The small menu offers four daily items that rotate through the week. But for local Liberians (of which there are about 10,000, mostly in the city's southwest corner) this humble yet tidy little dining room with plastic-covered tables is as close as it gets to a home-cooked meal in Monrovia, near where owner Antoinette Butler hails from.
Butler, who was a government worker when she fled Liberia's political turmoil in 1993, opened Memdee's eight months ago, adding her middle name, Memie, to her sister Dorothy Massaquoi's Dee. There are two other sisters - Martha Davis and Corrette Zayzay, plus mom Bah Davis - who help Butler in the kitchen during the lunch rush, peeling eggplants for stew, stirring cassava-leaf purees, checking on the still-baking banana-corn bread.
