John T. Edge finds international cuisine a more comfortable fit

Thirteen years have passed since I moved from Atlanta to Oxford, Miss., to chuck my corporate career and plunge into graduate school. When I left Little Five Points, I did so with some regret. I was in love with diverse and eclectic Atlanta. I was in the thrall of my neighborhood.

On the day before departure, I bought a gallon of green sauce from (the now defunct) Tortillas, scarfed a lunch of Varsity pimento burgers and made one last run to the Dekalb Farmers Market, where I stocked my cart with udon noodles, green curry paste and fish sauce. I figured that the Kroger in Oxford wouldn’t offer easy access to such exotica.

I was right. But Oxford offered its own diversity. I soon was eating kibbe at Marie’s Lebanese cafe, just off the square. In time, I learned that the Chinese restaurant, down on University Avenue, was owned by a Vietnamese family. After a month of courting, the proprietor served me an early lunch of pho, the beef broth and noodle soup that is the de facto national dish of Vietnam.

In the years that followed, that Vietnamese family disappeared. And Marie’s closed. So did the Nepalese restaurant, set in a Texaco station on Molly Barr Road, where the left-hand side of the heat-lamp buffet was stocked with cardboard pizza and corn dogs, and the right-hand side held chickpea stew and momo, dumplings of minced beef and onions.

Truth be told, those restaurants were mere aberrations, peculiarities of the sort that one expects in a college town. Only in the past couple of years has Oxford found its international footing. Honest taquerias have opened, serving menudo on Saturday morning and bus stop tacos seven days a week. We now have an Indian restaurant, Maharajah, where the vegetarian-leaning owner stocks the buffet with stewed okra. Marie’s has even reopened, and serves kibbe west of downtown.

Now comes Mama Kumba’s African Cafe, set in a BP station, on the eastern fringe of town across from the Kroger shopping center. The gas station owners are of Indian descent. When they bought the store a few years back, they put the racks of saris near the front door, within sight of the pork rinds display. For a while, they sold samosas and plate lunches of tandoori chicken. But the cafe, with five plywood booths each painted lipstick red, never earned a following.

Last month, Guelel Kumba, a Senegalese-born guitar player — who has cooked in what seems like every kitchen in town, from sushi bars to pizza joints — began dishing plate lunches of yassa, roasted chicken stuffed with garlic and onions and parsley; saka saka, a stew of beef, okra and smoked fish; and a Senegalese riff on shrimp and grits, chocked with cabbage, turnips and eggplant.

Kumba’s food, around $6 a plate, served with a tumbler of homemade hibiscus tea or ginger-ade, seems definitively foreign. But then I note the framed picture of his mother on the front counter and fix on the knowledge that he named his restaurant in her honor. In that moment, as I tuck into a platter of saka saka, as I fork a tangle of gooey okra, a recognizably Southern pattern comes into focus, as does the imprint of the various immigrants who have long shaped our region.

— John T. Edge is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. Visit the Web site: www.southernfoodways.com.