The thesis behind FieldTrip, which the chef and restaurateur JJ Johnson opened in Harlem last year, resounds. The phrase “Rice is culture” is plastered everywhere in the small counter-service shop: on the wall, on employees’ T-shirts and face masks, on snapback caps for sale. The 2017 cookbook “Between Harlem and Heaven,” a collection of “Afro-Asian-American” recipes by Johnson and his former boss Alexander Smalls, includes an essay that argues, “If we traveled the world from Africa to Asia and all the points of the diaspora, we could eat only rice and we would not starve. On the contrary, we would feast.” Rice, they note, accounts for more than twenty per cent of the diet of at least 3.5 billion people, and, outside of Asia, West Africans consume more rice than any other population in the world. The West African dish known as jollof rice is so central to the region’s culture that there are memes devoted to the debate over whether Ghanaians or Nigerians make it better.
And so jollof is, naturally, the centerpiece of one of FieldTrip’s multicultural rice bowls—each featuring a different, carefully sourced variety, scooped with a wooden paddle from an enormous rice cooker and paired with a protein and sundry garnishes. In Johnson’s jollof, fragrant, fluffy basmati is dyed red with tomato paste and palm oil and topped with roasted broccoli, cucumber coconut yogurt, and a flaky, paratha-like flatbread that’s an homage to the one his grandmother used to make. In another bowl, glossy round grains of nutty Chinese black rice (high in antioxidants and fiber), fried with blistered edamame and nubs of pineapple, are a pedestal for a slim fillet of salmon, blanketed in a zesty piri-piri sauce the color of the ripest mango.
Carolina Gold, named for the golden fibrous strand visible on each raw kernel, gets fried, too, and matched with nuggets of fried chicken breast in a thick barbecue sauce that plays nicely off the seasonal wok vegetables that come in every bowl: on a recent visit, a tangle of slick, slightly smoky chopped collards, cubes of sweet potato, and charred shishitos. The barbecue-brisket bowl, with bits of fatty beef and chipotle black beans strewn across saucy Texas brown rice, made me feel like a cowboy sitting around a campfire.
For dessert, there’s a neon-pink version of a Rice Krispie treat—made from house-puffed rice spiked with dragon-fruit juice—and rice-milk soft serve; to drink, there are several varieties of sake, including one that comes in a juice box, and a canned makgeolli, a Korean-style beer brewed from rice. There is even rice in the salad: a spoonful of cold red rice is nestled atop raw spinach with mandarin orange and red onion. (This is the second-best thing to do with leftover rice, if you ask me; the best is to fry it.) Despite this, you could cobble together a meal absent of rice altogether, supplementing sides of meat or fish and vegetables with super-crunchy, salty-sweet fried yucca chips, laced with garlic, ginger, and chili; rangoon-inspired crab pockets, gooey with garlic-herb cream cheese; and sweet plantains glazed in hot honey so that tiny strips of red pepper adhere to their surfaces.
Rice is culture, and rice is comfort. There’s no outdoor seating at FieldTrip, and although Central Park and Marcus Garvey Park are both just a few blocks away, I found myself, on a recent visit, too hungry to make it to either. Instead, I raced back to my car, where I slid the driver’s seat back as far as it would go and dug into my rice, alternating bites with sips of a frothy virgin piña colada, and found a certain kind of contentment. Around me, the neighborhood surged on. A health aide pushed her elderly charge in a wheelchair. A deliveryman piled packages onto a dolly. Two women shouted at each other from a distance, seeming to argue heatedly until, suddenly, they burst into laughter, and I realized they were friends. (Dishes $2.50-$13.) ♦
