A visit to Somalia

2026-02-03 - 16:08

The other day I flew to Somalia on the 67A bus to Stoddard Rd, that lively, concentrated zone of Africa and Islam in the low-income Auckland suburb of Mt Roskill, for a literary appointment as well as lunch. My destination was Banaadir, supposedly New Zealand’s only Somali restaurant. I wanted to try a certain dish. I had been reading about it in the pages of a novel that has been longlisted for the fiction prize at the Ockham book awards and may very well make it through to the shortlist and pose a realistic challenge to the favourite, Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt, to claim the $65,000 prize. The novel is Before the Winter Ends by Wellington writer Khadro Mohammed. The dish her characters eat on page 45 is beef injera. She made it sound delicious—and it has inspired another Wellington writer, Jackie Lee Morrison, to attempt to make the dish and report on it in her new YouTube podcast series Served With Rice in which she cooks meals inspired by writers of colour. Brilliant idea! I love a cooking show, and its literary dimension gives Served With Rice a unique flavour. As well as the Khadro Mohamed dish, she will cook a meal in honour of Damien Levi of Āporo Press, publisher of another novel longlisted for this year’s Ockhams, Hoods Landing by Laura Vincent. “The goal is to deepen the discourse around books by writers of colour beyond tokenism and trend cycles,” Jackie Lee states of her new podcast. Yes, and also make yum food. She’s a former chef. She worked at Claridge’s Hotel in London and later “a whole bunch of high-end and Michelin restaurants” before moving to Wellington in 2016. She ran Lashings café in Leeds St for four years and gained an MA in creative writing from the The International Institute of Modern Letters. She is working on her debut novel, a family drama set in Hong Kong. Served With Rice is a Trans-Tasman collab. Jackie Lee co-hosts it with Australian-Asian authors Emma Pei Yin and Jacquie Pham. On one podcast each month, they will chat with Kiwi and Australian PoC writers about their books, lives, culture and identity, and tuck into a cooked meal on camera. (It’s primarily a visual podcast but also available as audio only). The three New Zealand guests are Chris Tse, Damien Levi, and Khadro Mohamed. Jackie Lee emailed, “I’m making a tea-smoked duck bou jai faan (Chinese claypot rice) for Chris. For Damien I’m thinking about doing a twist on purini mamaoa with caramelised apples as a nod to Āporo Press and his Māori heritage, and for Khadro I’m planning on making Somali-inspired injera and beef suqaar mentioned in her book.” She referred to a scene in Before the Winter Ends. Khadro Mohamed writes, “Asha’s mother serves the two of them bowls of fried beef cubes drenched in oil and cardamom shells, hot injera on the side. Asha finishes her bowl quickly. She eats faster than she means to, but she can’t stop when she takes one bite after another. The familiar taste is addictive.” Jackie Lee said, “There’s actually a few passages in the book around injera and fried beef, but this is the one that made me hungry when I was reading.” Yes, same. Hunger must always be sated and so it was that I rode the 67A bus to order beef suqaar from Somali restaurant Banaadir in Stoddard Rd, Mt Roskill. Gosh I love Stoddard Rd. I devoted a chapter to it in my book Civilisation: 20 Places at the Edge of the World. Mt Roskill featured as one such edge; an Auckland suburb felt as remote and strange as Winton, Tangimoana, Hicks Bay or any of the other small but intensely formed dots on the map that I wrote about. I remember hanging out with a Syrian and an Egyptian outside the King Tut takeaway bar on Stoddard Rd (“freight vans, removal vans, coolstore vans, flatbed trucks, and beat-up second-hand Japanese jalopies run bumper-to-bumper and with light industrial purpose”), and interviewing them over cups of sweet, black CTC tea made in India. We were joined by a refugee who made delicious semolina squares sold at King Tut. “I am a Palestinian from Iraq,” said Loia Mouhmod. He put it another way: “I am two problems.” I titled the chapter, in the full Dave Dobbyn spirit of hospitality, “Welcome Home”. New Zealand exists as an immigrant story. Among the best ways to tell it is through food. I asked Jackie Lee Morrison how she planned to go about cooking the dish Khadro Mohamed writes about in Before the Winter Ends, and she said, “One of the parts I’m quite excited about is making Somali injera or ‘anjero’ as it’s sometimes called. My research led me to a Somali food blog run by a husband and wife team, so for the injera, I plan on making a fermented batter with sorghum flour, white corn masa harina (both can be purchased online from NZ-based stores or found in health food stores), and self-raising flour, letting it ferment overnight (there’s a passage in Khadro’s book where Omar is talking to his grandmother on the phone, trying to make injera for his depressed mother, and she tells him the best injera is made by leaving the batter overnight), then cooking in a pan. “For the beef suqaar, from my research reading various recipes, it’s very similar to a spiced beef stew (suqaar comes from an Arabic word which means ‘small ones’, so the only real specification is that it should be diced small). However, the passage from Khadro’s book specifies that the beef is ‘drenched in oil and cardamom shells’, which makes me think of a Chinese technique where you splash your cooked food with hot oil just before serving to release the aroma, so I’m going to steep cardamom in hot oil and finish the dish by pouring it on top (there’s also cardamom in the xawaash spice, which is a staple in Somali cuisine and quite easily made with store cupboard spices).” Fantastic. As such I was fairly foaming at the mouth with hunger and excitement when I ordered beef suqaar from Banaadir. It’s the last cafe on the left at the end of the glass tunnel of the Tulja Centre, a little migrant-only arcade opened on Stoddard Rd in 2013; it also houses South Asian designs at boutique clothing store Kriti Attire, and restaurants Kabul House (speciality: charcoal kebabs) and Indian-Chinese joint Mirchi Express. Banaadir occupies a small room. There are three tables for two, and a table for six. There were photos of Somalia on the walls and an electric bug-zapping machine on top of the Coca-Cola fridge. English is not spoken at the Tulja Centre as a matter of birth. I tried speaking with Abudlkadir, owner of Banaadir, about whether the meal I ordered was, as per Before The Winter Ends, “fried beef cubes drenched in oil and cardamom shells”. He said he wasn’t sure how it was made. He was a tall, rather mocking character; he laughed and joked with a group of men, including an old guy who had hennaed his hair and beard bright orange. Before I visited, I asked Khadro Mohamed about the meal in her book. She replied, “I am super happy to send you a little recipe on the food: Jerky-Style Beef Cubes (Oodkac/Muqmad) Cubes de Boeuf Façon Viande Séchée لحم بقري مجفف – Xawaash (ignore the section on the dates!) it is essentially a traditional dish that is eaten in Somalia and Somali households. It’s really delicious! It’s cooked in different species but cardamom and cinnamon are the most common. I LOVE this dish, it’s one of my favourites and it feels really nostalgic to eat. My mum made it a lot when I was younger, it’s usually eaten for big events but sometimes people just make a big batch and eat it for a couple days. People used to make it when going on long journeys as well, you would make a big batch and store it and then carry it with you, the ghee/oil would make sure the meat didn’t harden.” But this wasn’t the beef suqaar I ate at Banaadir. I arrived on Friday afternoon, or Jummah, the holy day, the Islamic sabbath; 1pm is rush-hour at Stoddard Road’s mosques, the most popular of the five daily prayers. Groups of men emerged from their prayers and stood on the pavement, reaching out with their arms and holding each other at their wrists. In Banaadir, the $23 dish I ordered was a beef stew served with carrots, onion, potatoes, and red peppers. It arrived in a bowl alongside two flatbreads. I spoke with the cook, Rohena, a woman from Afghanistan. Language made things slow and ponderous. The information I eventually obtained was that she cooked strips of beef with half a teaspoon of curry powder, paprika, and coriander, and a pinch of garam masala. No cardamom. No cinnamon. I liked it; it was kind of sweet, very tasty, not especially more-ish and a bit short of delicious. I could have done without the carrots. The bread was good. Two other customers arrived, and ate samosa with black tea. It was very quiet. Now and then there was laughter from Abdulkadir and the man who painted himself orange. I scoffed most of my bowl which wasn’t the beef saqaar in the Khadro Mohamed novel and thought: I will watch Jackie Lee’s YouTube podcast Served With Rice on April 14 for the real thing. Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohamed (Tender Press, $30), longlisted for the fiction prize at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand national book awards, is available in selected bookstores nationwide.