Veronica’s Kitchen – The Fufuland

Seeking African food – a cuisine that’s hard though not impossible to find in Orange County – we traveled up to Los Angeles to try Veronica’s Kitchen, a widely praised Nigerian/West African restaurant in Inglewood that’s been open since 2007. We may have visited on a bad day, but our meal and overall experience weren’t fantastic.

The highlights were hand pastry-style meat pies, which appeared to have been reheated to order, and traditionally spiced jollof rice with soft, sweet cooked plantains, both cooked fresh. We also enjoyed piping hot but mildly flavored Nigerian red stew, served atop fried fish, and were OK with the fufu – a pillow-like starch ball with the texture of mochi and flavor like mashed potatoes. We haven’t yet had a version of fufu that we really liked (and we’ve tried!), but if there’s any place to sample it, a place that advertises itself as “Fufuland” seemed like a good idea.

On the other hand, even by our adventurous standards, the okra soup with goat was an all-timer – from flavor to texture, it was the slimiest food we’ve ever experienced, with no strong flavor as a reward; it was a hunk of cooked, bone-in meat floating in a gelatinous green swamp. Authentic though it may have been, none of us could get past a couple of bites, and it has lived rent-free in our culinary nightmares since then, occasionally coming up in discussions of odd foods we’ve encountered.