The dish is called Hands Only, and the folks behind the Cecil, food facts the restaurant in Harlem where it is served, are not kidding about that. To give you an extra nudge of encouragement, they usher it to your table with a hot aromatic towel that has been steamed with lemon thyme, kaffir lime and lemon peel.
Not that you’re apt to resist digging in. Hands Only begs to be ripped apart with messy, hungry abandon.
For wrap-making and plate-swabbing, you have a soft, chewy, grilled roti from Hot Bread Kitchen. To squeeze between those swatches of flatbread, you have nubs of rabbit sausage from D’Artagnan, a scoop of coconut sticky rice that’s made fragrant with Thai basil, tender florets of cauliflower that have been stewed with cinnamon, and a ladle’s worth of black-eyed peas simmered with chiles.
That’s a lot of flavors at once, and the Cecil’s executive chef, Joseph Johnson, who is known as J J, explained that all that palate-hopping is meant to allude to a lot of places at once: India, Trinidad, West Africa. “It’s a melting-pot dish,” he said. “You can see the path of where it has gone.”
That’s a lot of flavors at once, and the Cecil’s executive chef, Joseph Johnson, who is known as J J, explained that all that palate-hopping is meant to allude to a lot of places at once: India, Trinidad, West Africa. “It’s a melting-pot dish,” he said. “You can see the path of where it has gone.”
Versions of roti can be found all over the world, of course. Mr. Johnson encountered it on a research trip to Ghana. You find countless twists on it in the Caribbean — and, lately, at restaurants like the Grey in Savannah, Ga., and the Progress in San Francisco.
At the Cecil, Hands Only is part of a new menu that Mr. Johnson unveiled this year, fueled by his desire to deepen the restaurant’s exploration of the food of the African diaspora.
The dish does have a way of coaxing people together — you may order it for yourself or with a group, but you should not expect to keep it to yourself. “What happens now,” Mr. Johnson said, “is it turns into a communal dish.”
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