Please note that since writing this blog post, Toko MC has closed down
I don’t usually read recipe blogs. As in, I look at the list of ingredients – I just don’t really do the blog part. You know the ones: they always seem to be written by smug mothers banging on about what they cooked their little darlings for dinner whilst busily not having a job. Then a friend sent me this blog by Luke Haines (of the Auteurs and Black Box Recorder and probably some other bands I’ve vaguely heard of but wouldn’t know what they’d sung) and I found myself reading every recipe from start to finish. Fucking funny. To use a four-letter word (well, a four-letter word plus ‘ing’) that he seems to like a lot.
Anyway, that was kind of an aside. Last night I went to Toko MC with a couple of foodie friends. It’s a new-ish Caribbean restaurant in the Westerpark that also has DJs and performances and things. I jog past it all the time, and was curious to see what it was like inside… well, it’s kind of big and stripy, with yellow and black bar code-patterned walls and funky wooden light shades. We had plenty of time to get to know the decor, as there was no danger of any drinks or menus for a good 20 minutes after we sat down.
Fairly starving by this point, we decided to order hapjes AND starters to share, main courses and two bottles of wine. You know: just to give me plenty of material on which to judge the place. The hapjes were mostly abysmal. It was as though the chef had taken the single guiding principle of Dutch hapjes (throw everything in a deep-fat fryer) and then applied it to semi-Caribbean ingredients. The deep-fried cassava was bulletproof and cheek-suckingly dry; I don’t really know much about cassava, but I don’t think it’s supposed to turn out that way. The onion rings were – well, like onion rings from Maccie D’s, but I didn’t understand what was Caribbean about them. There were three spiced, salted, fried prawns (there were four of us, and we’d been assured the sharing plate would have four of everything) and three marinated chicken wings. The latter were by far the best: sticky, aromatic with spices and almost chocolaty. But again, not enough to go round.
We shared two starters. The first was carpaccio with cashew nuts and wasabi mayo. It was about as Caribbean as the onion rings, and I prefer the Italian version. The second was mackerel ceviche with lime, grapefruit, avocado and a sesame dressing. It was quite tasty, but by this point I was starting to wonder if I knew anything about Caribbean food at all. (I don’t, incidentally – other than what I ate when I lived in Brixton, London, six years ago – but that’s beside the point.)
The main I’d wanted, which involved pork ribs and sweet potatoes, had run out (by 8 o’clock? and without telling me before I’d looked at the menu?) so I opted for the beef skewer with butter beans. The beef was grilled a little longer than I’d have liked, but the flavour was decent. The buttery, garlicky dressing the beans came in was also good, but the beans themselves were severely undercooked. The dish came with a semi-sweet red cabbage and beetroot coleslaw (at least, it was red – I’m struggling to remember the flavour and I didn’t take notes), and barbecue sauce for the meat.
We decided to skip dessert and plump for a cocktail instead. Toko MC has a reasonably extensive cocktail list (although the boys complained they were all too pink and girly) and we wanted to see what the jack-of-all-trades waiter would produce. (We saw the same guy taking the orders, doing the washing up, making the cocktails and spinning the decks – which is possibly why the service was so slow.) I had a raspberry martini, which was by far the nicest thing I’d put in my mouth all evening, and I could’ve easily ordered a second. Instead, we asked for the bill, which came to about €45 each. Not bad, but then again not a lot about the meal had been good.
Various dishes on the menu advertised themselves as ‘Tokologish’ which I assume meant they were the house specials. Not much was logical about the food at Toko MC, which is maybe why they felt the need to make up for it in the titles.
