A Theoretical Africa

The new East African restaurant Cafe Hunter is a peculiar place--not an African restaurant in the sense of a place with Highlife music on the stereo and thatch on the walls (or, actually, African customers), but sort of a theoretical place, a mind space with an African-inflected menu within the popular Iranian restaurant Shekarchi. There are something like 10,000 “ethnic” restaurants in Los Angeles County, probably, but fantasy Iranian-African food is something we’ve never seen. (As it turns out, the owner’s wife grew up in East Africa.)

Technically, Cafe Hunter is a separate cafe space, apart from the sleek, blond-wood Shekarchi, with unvarnished captain’s chairs around the tables and no view of the open grill, but Shekarchi is rarely full enough yet to generate overflow. As a practical matter, you will be seated in Shekarchi itself and given both an Iranian menu and the new, brief African one.

The food is something like the usual Iranian dishes, but with a slightly spicier twist. Sambusas are pretty close to samosas, I guess--flaky, deep-fried turnovers filled with spiced beef or a curry-tinged potato mixture dotted with green peas--except the texture of the crust is closer to a chimichanga than anything you might get in an Indian restaurant, and they’re served with a blender-whirred tomato-chile salsa that is remarkably like the stuff my Mexican-American mother-in-law makes to put on her eggs.

Kasori is basically chunks of steamed corn on the cob in a sauce of spiced peanut butter, like an exotic appetizer from a 1962 issue of Gourmet. The biryani is a chicken stew with rice; tender, spicy, complexly tart, more like what you might associate with a decent Iranian stew than with East African cuisine, but I’m sure it swings both ways.

Essentially, although flavors vary, there are only so many things you can do with food. Pieces of marinated grilled beef served on flat bread with a rough sauce of tomatoes and chiles might come from Pakistan, or Kenya, or Iraq, be a Mexican taco or a Navaho taco or a Colombian steak with arepas . Cafe Hunter’s version, called mishkaki , is a well-marinated beef kebab, extravagantly seasoned and with a mean ginger bite on the aftertaste, served on a sheet of Iranian tanur bread.

The pilao here--brothy, sharply seasoned, almost crunchy with cumin seeds and whole allspice berries--has, of course, a family resemblance to the Iranian rice dishes called polo , but also to various West Indies rice concoctions, wet Mexican rice and, oddly enough, to the black-cumin-spiked Uzbeki plov at the Uzbekistan restaurant in Hollywood. As with the plov , here is the ruddy color, the lush texture, the spicing that is undeniably exotic but congruent with food we all know. (It doesn’t taste at all bad with a sprinkle from the omnipresent shaker of ground sumac, a spice that presumably never made it as far south as Uganda.)

Here too, served with the pilao , is a garnish of grilled meat, in this case a skewer of marinated chicken kebab that may (or may not) be a little more highly seasoned than Shekarchi’s regular chicken kebab, but wouldn’t cause anything like cognitive dissonance if you came across it sitting next to a lula kebab on a combination plate.

At Cafe Hunter, we truly are the world.

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What to Get

Recommended dishes: biryani , mishkaki , pilao

Where to Go

Cafe Hunter (in Shekarchi Restaurant), 1712 Westwood Blvd., Westwood, (310) 474-6911. Open daily for lunch and dinner. No alcohol. Street parking. All major credit cards accepted. Takeout and delivery. Dinner for two, food only, $13-$19.