Freda's: Caribbean Food in Manhattan Valley

Every now and then, you discover a restaurant that becomes "that" restaurant. The place where you perpetually end up ordering food from on lazy weekday nights, where you bring out-of-towners to on reunion lunches, and that you suggest as a date destination when you're feeling particularly unoriginal. The reasoning lies somewhere between you being just too lazy to find something new, the fear of change, and of course, the guarantee of a good meal. For me, that restaurant is Freda's Caribbean & Soul Cuisine, a small mom-and-pop West Indian restaurant between 109th Street and Columbus Avenue.

A small and unassuming little operation with a dining space big enough to seat about 20 people, the only two changes that I've seen in my past four years in Harlem has been the installation of couches and a small price hike on the menu.

As a bit of background information, Caribbean food (if one could really generalize the cuisine of the entire Caribbean region) in New York City generally refers to the food of what can be best categorized as the former member countries of the West Indies Federation: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent, and Trinidad and Tobago. (And Guyana, although we'll tackle that in another post) This cuisine has been influenced by the cooking methods of the indigenous people in the region, colonial Europeans, West African slaves, Indian indentured servants, and Chinese contract laborers. At Freda's, these incredibly diverse influences are combined with popular American soul food dishes, such as mac n' cheese and candied yams.

Prices have gone up $1 or $2 in the recent month, but rest assured, the portions provided are more than generous. The lunch special is still about $8, $9, so going during the afternoon is always a treat.

Note: this is an older menu I pulled from http://www.menupages.com/restaurants/fredas-caribbean-soul-cuisine/menu

For this routine visit, I went with the baked chicken with callaloo, beans and rice, and mac and cheese.

As per usual, the callaloo was perfectly stewed, a good foil for the more solid heaping of mac n' cheese and the fall-off-the-bone tender chicken.

My father, one of my go-to eating partners, went for the curried goat, collard greens, carrots and cabbage, and rice and beans.

A notable mention: the collard greens that I've had at Freda's are probably the best I've had anywhere; they're not too salty, and have that great stewed and savory/sweet taste that in this case goes perfect mixed in with nice fatty chunks of goat.

The bottom line? If you want to try really authentic Caribbean food, head over to 993 Columbus Avenue, New York, NY 10025. The staff is friendly, the food is good, the setting is cozy, and there's always some trashy TV show playing on the flat screens. Hey, I'm not complaining.