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Welcome to
Harlem Restaurant
for your
Breakfast and Diner
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Harlem Restaurant is located across from Harlem Street, according to a homemade sign. If you pass by in the afternoon, all the doors and windows will be closed, and a group of young men will interrupt their attaya brewing to yell, “Hey! Come here!”
But if you pass in the morning, the doors and windows will be open and Harlem Street will be empty except for some scattered children. So empty, you worry you’ve arrived too early, but if you ask, “Do you have breakfast?” you will be told “Yes.”
Harlem Restaurant is painted the same sea-foam green inside as out, and the plastic tablecloth is a similar color. There are no shelves, but plastic cups can be stuck into the gaps between overlapping sheets of corrugated metal and a wooden beam under a window holds a tin cup, small scraps of paper and an empty vial of banana essence.
Sona Sidibeh makes you a hard-boiled egg sandwich and a cup of NesCafé. When she notices you trying to cool off the NesCafé with the spoon she’s given you for stirring, she takes back the mug and cools it off for you, by pouring it back and forth between two cups. She introduces you to her daughter, who is two years old and drinking from a bowl of porridge. Sona checks on the water boiling over the fire, hands a cup of NesCafé to a man waiting outside the window, passes some bowls to the woman washing dishes outside. You don’t say much—she compliments your outfit, you comment on the weather—but as you get up to leave she says, “Later, if you want to eat breakfast, return here. Even if you don’t have money, I will give you food.”
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