$20 Diner: Kenyan mash-ups make for thrilling cheap eats at Swahili Village

(Michael S. Williamson/ THE WASHINGTON POST ) - The Swahili Village lunch platter serves seven diners and includes goat, chicken and beef, ringed with Ugali bread and veggies.

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You’ll have to excuse my rather academic interest in Kenyan cuisine up until this point. It’s been a while since I last stepped foot into such a restaurant. I can tell you the exact date, in fact: It was Jan. 20, 2009, that meat-locker-cold day when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. That afternoon, I had wandered over to Safari DC on Georgia Avenue NW, where there were no birther debates. They were celebrating, hard, for the man with Kenyan blood in his veins.

Safari DC closed less than a year later (and was recently resurrected as more of a pan-African outpost), but it wasn’t until I entered Swahili Village that I experienced the same gentle pulsating energy that I had found at Safari. It’s not clubby in its intensity, but it’s not family-sleepy either. It straddles those worlds with the kind of good humor captured only in the best neighborhood restaurants catering to immigrants so far away from home. In an L-shaped room outfitted with vibrant paintings of African life, as a friend and I split an ice bucket of Tusker beer (five to a container, so you can fight over the last bottle), I felt as if I had been granted honorary Kenyan status for the evening.

Swahili Village

$ ($14 and under) | African

Hours: Tue-Sun 11:30a-midnight

10606 Baltimore Ave. Suite A, Beltsville, MD 20705

Information: 240-965-7651

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It’s easy to feel expansive when you’re digging into Swahili Village’s now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t samosas, each stuffed with ground beef fragrant with a spice blend that Onyona imports from Kenya because it’s too difficult to replicate the exact mixture in the States. Or the Kenyan-style sausages, the lush links that remind me of British bangers. Or the ghee-ful chapati flatbread, so perfect for wrapping pieces of grilled beef or dipping into a goat soup loaded with chunky vegetables and decades of culinary assimilation.

The lone alarm at Swahili Village is reserved for the appetizer known as bhajia, a basket of bland fried potato discs. Fortunately, they’re served with a tiny container of habanero-laced sauce. The condiment’s heat will radiate throughout your mouth and nasal cavities long after you’ve swallowed it, the burn as pleasant as a beam of sunlight shining through a cold window in winter. The sauce is also one of the few things here that’s not authentically Kenyan.

“The West Africans love hot peppers,” Onyona says. “We’re sort of evolving to cater to that group, too.”