Jiji's Restaurant

The Snootie Foodies went to Jiji's Restaurant after seeing several posts and rave reviews on Facebook about the restaurant.
Jiji's is located at the SMS pier -- upstairs on the right.  It's a nice location with a view of the river or the city depending on which direction your looking.
The restaurant serves Western European style food with a Surinamese twist.
This Snootie Foodie had a delicious carpaccio for an appetizer -- with pine nuts and Parmesan cheese.  It was excellent - best carpaccio I've ever had.  It was thinly sliced and absolutely delicious.  There was a really nice sauce -- really scrumptious.  This was followed by a stuffed chicken breast with some local veggies and cassave.  Again, this too was delicious.  It's hard to make chicken breast and have it not been dry -- this breast was excellent.  The only negative -- the sauce was pretty spicy, but I know that this is a plus for most Surinamese people.

My fellow Snootie Foodie had an order of fries as appetizer -- don't ask, we're special like that.  And she followed this with a delicious fish in a curry coconut sauce.  This was supposed to be shrimp in curry coconut sauce -- they had run out of shrimp though, so she received fish instead.  The fish was fried crispy delicious and the sauce was delicious as before.  It was quite spicy, which she liked, but burned my tongue/ sinuses.  :)

I also had a delicious tamarinde juice while my fellow Foodie opted for a fruity cocktail complete with umbrella.  :)

I didn't take any pictures so I pulled these off FB.

The only negative for the night was the service.  We had a nice young man who was helping us.  For the curry, the menu clearly states that it comes with rice but when it came to the table it was being served with fries.  So we asked the young lady who brought the order -- in reaction she gave us one of the loudest tjoerie (sucking sound made in annoyance) I've ever heard.  She quickly apologized though and stated that the tjoerie was meant for her colleague and not for us.  She then proceeded to call her colleague over and berate him in front of us at the table.  This was definitely a negative for an otherwise great evening.

All in all, I'd go back and I'm sure the food will be equally good.  And I'll just make sure to let the server know whether I want rice or fries or potatoes with my entree.  :)

The Best "Surinamese' Food in Paramaribo

It's difficult to talk about Surinamese food and only identify one type of food -- since there is such a diversity in Suriname... the roti we serve here is Surinamese, as our bamie is completely different from bamie in Java/ Indonesia -- so this too could be categorized as Surinamese food.

When people speak of Surinamese food though, they're usually talking about the creool food.
The best restaurant to get this type of food is at De Gadri.  De Gadri is located between Fort Zeelandia and the Waterkant -- walk in front of the Fort Zeelandia towards the water, and you will arrive at de Gadri.  It's more a terrace than a real restaurant.

They serve excellent creools food -- peanut soup, okra soup, moksi alesie, etc etc.  They have sandwiches in the morning and hot food from early afternoon until 10 pm (they are closed on Sunday).
I've had several dishes -- stick to the creoolse dishes especially the soups.  They do have bamie, but I don't recommend it very much.  The bruine nasie though, is very good.

The portion sizes are quite good and they serve a variety of vegetables every day -- which all taste good.

Go to the website eteninsuriname.com and you can see what the specials of the day are:

http://www.eteninsuriname.com/Eis/Fof/Crd/ShoCrdPhp.php?Cmd=CrdIni&ResNum=37&SitLan=1&ResLan=1

Snootie Foodies International

One of the original Snootie Foodies members, Lenny, has moved to Tanzania and started a Snootie Foodies chapter in Dar Es Salaam.

The group gets together and eats out or cooks for each other/ potluck style dinners.

This was Lenny's contribution to the dinner -- an awesome paella .... makes me want to move to Dar Es Salaam.  :)

The BEST hamburgers in Suriname

It's official - the very best hamburgers (only just squeezing out the d 'Optimist's burger) can be found at Bar Zuid at the van Sommelsdijckstraat.

Umar Nazier, who lived in Texas for several years, started Big Tex Burgers at Bar Zuid.  Bar Zuid has it's own menu -- the quality is what you would expect in a bar.  The Big Tex burgers are a different story all together.  They are handmade and absolutely fabulous.

Another delicious menu item is the garlic french fries -- when they say garlic/ they mean garlic!  They also have nice crispy fried chicken wings -- the only thing missing is the blue cheese.

Umar has turned into quite the culinary aficionado and the menu is occasionally expanded with things such as ribs and green bun burgers on St. Patrick's Day.  Or even better the special on March 15th was ginger wasabi marmalade tuna, pan seared with sesame oil served with a side of fresh snow peas sauteed with garlic in duck fat....  not sure where else in Suriname you will find anything like it.

To find out what the specials are follow Big Tex Burgers on Facebook.  If you want a special make sure you arrive early, because the specials sell out fast.

New sushi restaurant - Wasabi

There is a new sushi restaurant in Paramaribo - Suriname.  It is called Wasabi, and is located where Roline's used to be located on the Weg naar Maretraite (or Gompertstraat).
I went and had dinner there -- and I must say that my review will be somewhat biased because they have..... Thai ice tea.... ooooohhh be still my heart AND plum wine.  Yum yum yum.  :)

The menu is a very nice book with all pictures -- every dish (well nearly every dish) is shown with a nice big color picture and the prizes are listed with A, B and C -- so you can decide whether you'd like several small portions or just a few large portions.

We tried the miso soup -- delicious full of seaweed and very nice, the edamame -- don't bother, they were undercooked and ice cold, the fried dumplings -- we tried the chicken variety and they were very very good -- thin wrapping and a lot of very tasty filling/ strangely though they were served with a sauce similar to mayonaise... (?), and salmon sashimi -- delish served over some veggies and ice.  For sushi we tried some rolls with roe -- don't quite remember the name with it was a dish with three rolls all different types, and the unagi roll -- the proportion seemed a bit off -- there was no way to put the entire roll in your mouth at once given the amount of rice and the size of the piece of eel; if however, you tried to eat it in several bites the whole thing fell apart since the eel wasn't really attached to the rice.  We also tried a different roll with cucumber and crab -- it was pretty good, but again huge sized rolls.

The menu is quite extensive including unagi, lobster or shrimp fried rice, udon noodles, grilled fish -- even an intriguing sounding sake salmon, chicken, steak and pork chops.

The highlight of the meal was the Japanese soda -- which required the waiter to open the bottle -- it was delicious and kinda cool.  :)

The interior is unrecognizable -- if you were a Roline's client.  It looks very nice/ nice atmosphere and there is a nice wooden deck outside dining area.  :)

I will definitely be returning if they keep up the quality of their food and service.

Sushi in Suriname

There are five places in Suriname, as far as I know, where you can get sushi.

Spice Quest has a Japanese (sit on the floor) dining area where you can have sushi.  The problem with the sushi here was: 1. you had to make a reservation at least one day in advance so that the chef could make sure he had the ingredients to make sushi, 2. there was no set menu so you were getting whatever the chef was able to find, 3. you had to have at least 4 people in your group to be able to go (but I did see couples there at times so this may not be enforced), and it was an entire meal -- $30 for miso soup, seaweed salad, sashimi, sushi, tempura and a dessert.  Not a bad deal at all and the food was always yummy.

Sushi Ya is the first sushi restaurant to open in Suriname.  When it first opened, I believe I went and had sushi at least once a week for the first six months.  The sushi was good, the miso soup was good, the seaweed salad was good, the sashimi was good.... everything was good.  As with most restaurants in Suriname though, the quality of the food has not remained the same.  For the past few months, the food has been so so.... the tuna tasted fishy (never a good sign), the edamame was old (it looked dried out and wrinkled), the usually delicious baby back ribs had a completely different flavor and one of our party ended up with diarrhea....
I'm not sure if this was a one-off incident -- perhaps the chef was sick at home or the usual shipments didn't come in or something along those lines.  Generally speaking, the food here is good.  The salmon sashimi is delicious -- pure, non fishy, firm and fresh tasting.  The bbq salmon hand roll is my favorite -- satisfying ration of rice to fish to seaweed.  The soft shell crab roll is also very good, as are many of the unagi rolls.  Even the non-sushi dishes are good, the teriyaki chicken and the baby back ribs are excellent.  The miso soup is good -- the Thai coconut soup is not (don't bother with it).  The tempura is relatively good, and the desserts are tasty (although a bit too expensive).
So, I'm hoping that Sushi Ya will pull through and keep it together.

Unsei Yaki started as primarily a teppanyaki restaurant but they have now expanded with a dedicated sushi eating area.  The sushi eating area is cute -- you get slippers and sit on the floor.  There is one table which has open space under the table for your legs so you don't need to fold up on the floor.  I found the whole sushi eating area uncomfortable -- the slippers are cloth and immediate questions of "what if the person wearing these before me had some sort of food fungus" came up.  The table with the space underneath is soooo wobbly that you should not at any point actually lean on the table (this made sitting down and getting up a bit harder), and finally sometimes you don't want to sit on the floor -- if this is the case there are some tables on the other side of the building where you can sit.
Unsei Yaki has a larger collection of sushi options than Sushi Ya.  The menus are strange laminated cards that are stuck together -- you fold them open like a fan and then have to turn them over to check out front and back.  A lot of the sushi rolls have cooked food in them, a lot with cream cheese and/or mayo and some more unusual rolls.  The sushi is okay, the dragon roll is good and I like the inclusion of mango in many of the rolls.  There is no miso soup and frequently no edamame.  Overall the sushi is reasonably okay to good.

The Ramada Inn Princess Hotel (across from Tangelo next to Torarica) also has a teppanyaki/ sushi restaurant.  I've only gone once and I was disappointed.  The variety of sushi offered was very limited and the sushi was okay.  I don't even remembered what I ordered -- which shows how mundane it was.  I do remember that the sushi pieces were so huge that I had a hard time eating the pieces in one bite.  As you know, you can't eat sushi in two bites -- the whole thing falls apart - which it did.
There weren't many other choices on the menu either -- the focus of this restaurant appears to primarily be their teppanyaki.  I didn't try any of the other food so I'm not sure whether having a limited menu means that the items available are excellent (as it sometimes does when once focuses on fewer items done well instead of a lot of options all so so).

So -- this was  brief recap of sushi in Suriname.  Sushi Ya, Unsei Yaki and Ogi (the restaurant at the Ramada Inn) all have FB pages where you can check out the menus.

Happy eating...  :)

Nickerie

Well the Snoodies have been off the air for quite some time now -- blame my fellow Snoodies, one left for Tanzania and the other fell in love and started a night MBA program.  So they basically both disappeared.

I took a trip to Nickerie recently and decided to talk about my trip a little and figured that this is the forum to do it on....

First off, Nickerie is about a 4 hour drive from Paramaribo -- be careful in both Saramacca and Coronie as the police like to lie in wait with speed guns and hand out tickets.  You can make the trip closer to 3 hours if you speed, have no other traffic and notice no cops along the way.

About the only entertainment about in Nieuw Nickerie is going to the market or going swimming at the public pool.  Of course, you can always take a trip to the salt water flats and see the birds.  :)  In NN though.....

Where to stay in Nieuw Nickerie -- there are a variety of apartments and hotels in NN.  So far, I've tried three.  In order of preference (worst to best):

3. Hotel Concorde -- this hotel is two blocks west of the Residence Inn/ big market square.
Cons first: there appear to be three types of rooms -- on the ground floor there are small rooms with windows that look out on the hallway -- so you keep your curtains closed.  The rooms are kind of cave like.  Local television only.  Upstairs on the left -- there are nicer looking bigger rooms with balconies -- they actually look very nice.  Upstairs on the right are standard looking smaller rooms -- about the size of the downstairs rooms but with the ability to open the curtains and get some sunlight in the room.  At night though, the walls and ceiling come alive -- as things walk through the walls on in the ceiling all night long.
Breakfast is sad -- you tell the lady what you want, for example, bread, cheese, tea and that's exactly what you get, one soft (hot dog style) bun with a slice of cheese and a cup of tea.  No buffet -- no changing your mind, going for seconds, etc.  There is usually a cold option (cheese) and a hot option (like shredded chicken).

Pros: the prizes are reasonable about 80 srd per room.  The location is good -- walk to 'downtown' and the market.  Beds are reasonable, there is hot water, the air-conditioner works well and the restaurant has decent Indonesian food.

2. Regency Hotel Nickerie -- this hotel should really be tied with the Concorde in preference.  The hotel is located close to the hospital -- so not within easy walking distance of the market but still definitely within walking distance.
Cons: this hotel is not for light sleepers -- there is a bar next door which has karaoke on some nights and a DJ on other nights.  Between the music, the noisy air-conditioner and the automatic air freshener that automatically puffs all night long .... sleep is not easy to come by.  Another factor that kills it are the sheets -- they are cheap and rough causing the skin on your legs to become irritated after a while.
Pros: breakfast is a nice buffet upstairs on a great balcony with lots of wind.  There is bread, plenty of fixin's for your bread, as well as, fruit, yogurt, and cereal.  There is also a restaurant on this same balcony and the bar next door also serves food.  In the back is a casino.  Hot and cold water, cold air-conditioners, okay mattresses and good pillows.  The best feature was the free wi-fi.

1. The best spot to stay in Nickerie is in the apartment above the Self Reliance office.  A great big house with several bed and bathrooms, a huge living room, kitchen and nice balcony.  Also very reasonable prized.  Good quality beds and furniture.  You make reservations through the Self Reliance office.

As for food in Nickerie -- we didn't really get too adventurous.  Like I mentioned before the Concorde has a relatively good Indonesian restaurant.  Another local hangout which is okay is a place called Nancyland -- it's around the corner from the Self Reliance apartment and offers free wi-fi.  It's a burger, fries, BBQ place with ice cream sodas.  :)

We also tried the local sit down Chinese restaurant called (I believe) Kow Loon -- or something like it.  The waitress had no recommendations because "she doesn't eat there but always brings her food from home".... not really very encouraging.  The food as .... okay.... typical not really good Surinamese Chinese food.

The rest of our stay we spend primarily on the terrace by the Residence Inn hotel.  This is quite an experience.  The terrace seems to be permanently understaffed.  There is only one employee who mans the bar and the terrace.  Things are veeeerrrrryyyyyyyy sllllloooooowwwwwww......  and a little off as well.  The first time there we were not offered a menu -- we kept having to pull information out such as -- soooo do you have hamburgers?  Oh yes,....  oookkkaaayyy and what else....  Well what would you like.....  JUST GIVE US A DAMN MENU already.

After some frustrating moments (the bitterballen were all gone) we settled on an order of french fries and a cheeseburger.  The french fries were at least hot.  The cheeseburger.... the cheese was on the bread and so not melted at all.  The burger was very very solid -- probably put on the cook top straight out of the freezer.  Odd...

The things were ordered and tasted during our visits:
- pindasoep (peanut soup): basically your basic Maggie bouillon soep with spoon of peanut butter dissolved in it.  The chicken in the soup had this tasteless, dry, pre-cooked and then added at the last moment flavor.
- french fries: the first day they were your normal order of french fries (ketchup/mayo) with a slice of cucumber, tomato and lettuce on the side.  The second day, they apparently ran out of lettuce and added a spoonful of bitter melon on the side..... uuuggghhh

- sweet and sour fish: delicious fresh fried crunchy fish with a tomato/ Chinese pickled vegetable sauce.  Came with rice and long beans.
- vegetarian special: supposed to be a stir fried mix of local vegetables served with either rice or french fries (everything is served with either rice or french fries).  This was interesting -- the vegetables were potatoes - sliced thinly, frozen veggie mix peas, carrots and corn, some pieces of cabbage and maybe two pieces of something green like bok choy .....  very very interesting.....

So .... not the best food place so far but still plenty to explore.  The trip will try the Royal Inn since they supposedly have their own pool.  :)