Traditional African food

[ eat & drink] Eat Zawadi brings traditional African cuisine to the Four Corners

Eatery’s Chef Safari has been a staple around Durango since at least 2013

If you, like us, are elated whenever a new restaurant opens — especially one specializing in a type of food that’s hard to come by in the Four Corners — we have good news. Eat Zawadi, specializing in traditional African cuisine, has opened in Durango.

Chef Arnold Ngumbao, aka Chef Safari, has been a staple of the Durango food scene for a while now. He originally came to the city as a guest chef at the Strater Hotel’s Mahogany Grille while working as the chef at a five-star resort in Zanzibar, Tanzania. In 2013, he took over as the executive chef of the hotel and has since also done stints at the DoubleTree Hotel and Manna’s culinary arts program.

According to the Eat Zawadi Facebook page, Safari began working on Zawadi with Grant Andrew, the current owner of the Smiley Cafe, in February, right before you-know-what happened. But now it’s open at both the Smiley Cafe on East Third Avenue and a location in College Plaza on East Eighth Avenue, depending on what meal you’re looking for. It’s open at Smiley for lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, and for dinner on East Eighth Avenue from 4 to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

As soon as we found out about the African eatery’s existence, we had to try it and ordered a three-course dinner. Safari says the food is “Good Crazy,” and

It isn’t often that you come across restaurants that name themselves an exclamation. There aren’t many diners calling themselves “Now, This Is a Lot of Grease!” or pizza places identifying as “OMG, I Can’t Handle the Cheesiness!”

Farmington’s Mmm Que Rico!, on the other hand, does — prompting hungry eaters to wonder if the restaurant’s Mexican cuisine really will have them exclaiming, “How delicious!”

The first thing we noticed upon entering was its cute interior. In addition to the typical Mexican restaurant decor, there were a handful of other things that

Nick Gonzales/DGO » » Clockwise from left: Eat Zawadi’s Spicy Moroccan Lamb with couscous and sautéed greens, Papaya Coconut Treasure, and two Beef Samosas. If you’re basing your order off this photo, note that this is the half-order of the Spicy Moroccan Lamb.

“zawadi” is the Swahili word for “gift.” So we gifted ourselves with some food togo. (It’s all to-go at the dinner location.)

For an appetizer, we chose the beef samosas, which are packed with, well ... beef, with a hint of spice, wrapped in a perfectly-fried pastry shell. The mango chutney, for dipping, was also excellent, with its own set of interesting flavors and sizable chunks of mango in the mix.

For an entrée, we chose the Spicy Moroccan Lamb, which the menu says is cooked in a ten-spice curry sauce. They weren’t kidding. While it all tasted fantastic — the meat was among the best lamb we’ve had in Durango — there were quite a lot of flavors to unpack. In one bite, one of the licorice-tasting herbs (fennel maybe?) really jumped out in a surprising and wonderful way. But it wasn’t quite so noticeable in the rest of the curry. Above all else, though, what set the curry apart from others we’ve had around here was its fruitiness. Alongside the obvious savoriness was a strong coconut and raisin aura that ensured the core of the dish disappeared very fast.

The sides, couscous and sautéed greens, didn’t last much longer than the lamb curry.

The thing that stood out about the couscous were the cashews and yellow raisins, which added a savory and fruity aspect to the steamed semolina, even when it was eaten in separate forkfuls from the rest of the meal.

The collard greens, sautéed in what we’re guessing was butter, based on the flavor, with a little bit of onion, also complemented the entrée. The ever-so-slightly bitter vegetable taste balanced out the rest of the dish.

Even the dessert, Papaya Coconut Treasure — chilled, fresh papaya braised in coconut milk, with fresh ginger and lemon – was loaded with spices. A bite of the papaya itself, with the coconut milk, bursts into action with a sweet, fruity flavor that gives way to a more complex character that spreads across the palate, activating all sorts of receptors. As they all fade away, a pleasant ginger-based burn lasts on the tongue. For such a simple-looking fruit dish, it’s quite something.

There’s a 100% chance we’ll be going back for more in the very near future, and we’re excited for this new thread on — Nick Gonzales

Does Farmington’s Mmm Que Rico restaurant live up to its name?

Mexican eatery has interesting marg variations

Durango’s food tapestry.

Nick Gonzales/DGO caught our eye. For instance, we smiled at the cartoon employees painted above the passage leading back to the kitchen.

The second thing we noticed, upon opening the menu, was the selection of margaritas. There were the usuals, of course — pretty much every place will make you a strawberry margarita. But then there were a few that we don’t see very often at all. When deciding which one to get, it came down to either platano (banana) or miel (honey). We were less able to imagine what a honey margarita would taste like, so we chose Continued on Page 11

[ weed] From Oh Hi to Keef Life: Four cold cannabis drinks you should slurp on this summer

Summer is finally here, and it’s friggin’ hot, guys. Almost too hot to light up a joint out on your porch, one might say. Almost.

But for those of you who are struggling with the idea of flicking on a lighter when it feels like your face might melt off as soon as you step outside, thankfully, there are a lot of alternative options. Cue the parade of cold, cannabis-infused drinks you should be filling your fridge up with in case of emergency. A weed emergency.

In case you need a little guidance on what sort of beverage you should stock up on, here’s a few to consider. Oh Hi

Hard seltzer was the drink of 2019. Why can’t cannabis-infused seltzer be the drink of 2020?

These delicious drinks were created in a meeting of the minds between Durango Organics owners Jonny Radding and Aaron Miles, and Matt Vincent, one of the owners of Ska Brewing, these entrepreneurs released Oh Hi, a THC-infused sparkling seltzer, back in 2019.

The canned edibles, er, drinkables, are available in four flavors: ginger basil limeade, pomegranate, grapefruit, and lemon-lime. While pomegranate, grapefruit, and lemon-lime are dosed with 10 mg of THC each, ginger basil limeade contains 5 mg of THC and 5 mg of CBD. Keef Cola

Our resident pothead writer DGO Pufnstuf decided it would be a good idea to haul a bunch of Keef Cola cans out to the middle of nowhere to survive a rained-out camping trip.

While the camping part of the story sounded a little iffy, chugging Keef Colas sure wasn’t. It ended up being one of the best parts of the trip!

Camping or not, if you’re a soda

hound, Keef Cola is the perfect way to quench that thirst so you get that sugar AND the high. Keef Cola comes in four different flavors – grape, root beer, original cola, and orange crush, all of which have 10 mg of THC in them.

CannaPunch

Does anything say summer like a glass of punch? No? Well, we have good news for you. CannaPunch has plenty of tasty flavors that go together perfectly with this heat so prepare to be stoned whilst getting some sun this summer.

CannaPunch offers its drinks in pineapple mango delight, blue raspberry sour, grand daddy grape, watermelon nectar, and black cherry fusion. Each comes infused with 100 mg of THC each, so drinker beware! This stuff is hella potent.

Keef Life

Weed is the summer life, and no one gets that better than Keef.

Keef Life, Keef’s brand of THC-infused H2O, comes in four flavors: blueberry-lemon (indica), sour cherry (THC:1/CBD:1), cranberry lime (sativa), and strawberry kiwi (hybrid). They’re non-carbonated fruity juices made of CO2-extracted cannabis oil, reverse osmosis water, agave, monk fruit, and other natural flavors to give you that refreshing effect.

Keef Life comes in a 12-fluid-ounce bottle with a cap that you can use to measure out 10 mg of THC, a nifty tool seeing as each bottle comes with 10 servings. The best part is when you use the lids to measure out your servings, you can pretend to take a shot. — Sir Blaze Ridcully

[ art] Godzilla and Kayla Shaggy take on Toh-Atin’s Chief in comic

Semi-autobiographical comic “Godzilla Decolonizes Durango” describes personal encounters with racism in Durango

Amid national unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, renewed calls to remove racially insensitive monuments have spread across the United States. In Durango, this has placed the “Chief,” a giant sign that once advertised the Chief Diner on north Main Avenue, and now points at Toh-Atin Gallery, in the crosshairs.

The sign is the subject of two competing Change.org petitions, “Take Down ‘The Chief’ Racist Caricature Sign of Toh-Atin Gallery in Durango, Colorado” and “SAVE THE CHIEF SIGN,” each of which has several thousand signatures. And through the art of Kayla Shaggy, even world-famous kaiju are weighing in on the debate.

Shaggy’s semi-autobiographical comic “Godzilla Decolonizes Durango” describes her personal encounters with racism as a Native American living and working in Durango – up until the King of Monsters shows up in a dream, declares that he will avenge the injustices done to the indigenous residents of the city, and uses his atomic breath to

obliterate the Chief. “The sign is dehumanizing in a rather casual way,” Shaggy said. “It’s not overtly stereotypical or derogatory, but to indigenous people that live in that area that visit the area, they will see it and it’s a sign of how they themselves as a person and their culture is commodified and dehumanized.”

Shaggy said she was working on the comic, one of her first longer-form autobiographical works, for three weeks before the first of the Chief petition campaigns was launched. She said she was inspired to draw the comic after coming up with the visual of Godzilla destroying the sign while she was driving through downtown Durango, but wanted to input more meaning as to why she wanted Godzilla to destroy the sign. The end result was a complete comic rather than a single image.

When she heard that a petition against the Chief was launching at the same time as she was finishing up the comic, she added a reference to the petition on the last page to draw readers’ attention to it. Continued on Page 22