SAVORING D.C.’S DIVERSITY

By Linda Wheeler February 1, 1990

Longtime Washington restaurant reviewer Joel Denker sees the District as anything but a white wine and nouvelle cuisine kind of town.

For Denker, Washington has become a stroll through the cooking of Third World countries, where dishes start with rice and are dressed with fiery sauces.

He, for one, likes it better that way.

Denker, 45, has spent most of his adult life seeking out the unusual cuisines of Washington. Twenty years ago, he says, he was hard pressed to find more than a dozen restaurants offering anything besides American and European dishes.

Today, the city and close-in suburbs offer diners more than 100 choices for ethnic food from Trinidad, El Salvador, Jamaica, Thailand, Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Brazil, among others.

Denker has written a personal guide to 23 of them, titled “Capital Flavors,” but it might be dubbed “Denker’s Favorites.” In selecting the contents, Denker said he chose only the city’s most colorful restaurants with food he likes best.

The result is an insider’s guide to unique corners of this changing city and a rare glimpse at the characters and history behind some of the most interesting eateries in town.

For Denker, an appreciation of good food and a career teaching labor studies at the University of the District of Columbia are intertwined.

“The restaurants become a mirror of the evolution of the city,” he said. “We now have a large immigrant and refugee population from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Conversely, few restaurants represent the countries of Eastern Europe, he said, because “there are few middle-class and working-class people in Washington from Poland, Hungary and Russia.”

“There are more of those restaurants in New York and Chicago,” he said.

The allure of the capital and the area’s low unemployment rate draw new immigrants to Washington, Denker said. And the easiest jobs for new arrivals to find are in service and food preparation industries, where speaking English is not necessary.

“Restaurants and hotels . . . have become the counterpart of the steel mills and auto plants that attracted immigrants at the turn of the century,” he said.

He said he finds the best restaurants by asking cabdrivers from various countries where they like to eat and by watching for ads in small community newspapers.

“I discovered that food from the old country was important to the new arrivals, and they would gather wherever they could find food from home,” he said.

In 1984, Denker volunteered to review new restaurants that interested him for The Intowner, a monthly newspaper. His book grew out of those reviews.

But unlike many reviewers, Denker became as interested in the stories behind the restaurants and their owners as in the food they serve. He found those stories in small restaurants scattered around Dupont Circle, Adams-Morgan and Georgetown — even a few in Maryland and Virginia.

Ethel Prussia, for example, was a shoe-factory supervisor in Jamaica and later a nurse’s aide here before opening Jamaica Joe in Silver Spring. She said the restaurant filled her need to “do something for myself” and to satisfy the yearning of her countrymen for Jamaican specialties such as curried goat and plantains.

And Sutonta Thumprasert, formerly comptroller at the National Rural Development and Finance Corporation, said business leaders within the Thai community encouraged him to open Thai Derm in Silver Spring.

Thumprasert decided to have his Thai restaurant specialize in noodles, which he told Denker is the “equivalent to fast food” in Thailand. Today, Thai Derm offers more than 20 noodle dishes, several of which Denker’s book describes in tantalizing detail.

Denker lists no prices in his guide, nor does he use any rating system, explaining that all of his choices are excellent. But he does tell some political trivia. For instance, he says that the Bay of Pigs invasion was supposedly planned at the Omega in Adams-Morgan, the area’s first Cuban restaurant.

Denker’s gift is his ability to make his readers’ mouths water with his descriptions of favorite dishes.

“Shrimp with hot chilies is an incendiary stir-fry cooked with onions and scallions,” he writes of a dish in Thai Derm. “Pungent garlic lights up the meal.”

Of the condiments for shami kebab, a grilled lamb patty at the Katmandu Restaurant in Dupont Circle, Denker writes, “the house chutney, a blend of yogurt, mint, coriander, and green chilies, draws out the flavor of the barbecue. A little lemon squeezed on it enhances the taste. Munch on a raw onion after sampling the kebab and the experience will be even more pleasurable.”

If pressed, Denker will say that The Islander in Adams-Morgan is probably his favorite. He is also well known at the Trinidadian restaurant where the owner, Addie Green, wears colorful turbans and likes to emphasize the ethnic purity of the food she serves in the second-floor restaurant over Columbia Road NW.

“I cook like I used to cook at home,” she said. “I serve only food that represents my country.”

Green grew up in a restaurant run by her mother in the Trinidad capital of Port-of-Spain. She left home for nursing school in England but met an airman stationed near Northampton and married before finishing her studies. Her husband, Washingtonian Ernest Green, persuaded his bride to return here. He became a firefighter and, she says, leaves the cooking and restaurant business to her and her sons.

At lunch recently, her menu written on a chalkboard ranged from curried shrimp to goat rotis to vegetarian dishes. Denker said Addie Green’s restaurant is rightfully known for its rotis, or pancakes wrapped around a curried stuffing.

Roti, Green said, became popular in Trinidad when sugar cane workers discovered the versatile wrapping could be used to carry meals to the fields.

It is that sort of story, a bit of history worth retelling to dinner mates, that is the appeal of Denker’s work. The author has been around Washington since the late 1960s, when he opened an alternative high school for students rebelling against the established school system. As fitted the times, he cherished the few non-American restaurants here then.

“Ethnic restaurants are much more established than they used to be,” Denker said. “There was a time when they were considered Bohemian or underground places.”

Now their foodstuffs have become so familiar and popular that American restaurants add tamales to their sandwich list or moussaka to their entree offerings.

“It is hard to tell what American food is anymore,” Denker said. “It was the awareness of other cultures that has challenged Americans to revise their menus . . . . It is a favorable sign, a breaking down of barriers.”

Denker’s book, available at most area bookstores, is an invitation to get to know the city on different terms via some offbeat adventures of the palate available here. Denker also takes the fear out of the unfamiliar.

Said Addie Green: “I see people come in here with that book and I feel good. They already know all about me and now they’ve come to eat the food. It’s a lot like family.”