Dig into Nigerian food like bitter leaf soup near this Brooklyn stop

To eat well near the busy Broadway Junction J train stop in Brooklyn, you’ve got to be willing to walk a few blocks. Head west — just past the industrial sprawl of the transit center and the fast food chains — and tuck into one of these three spots on the eastern edge of Bed-Stuy.

Nigerian home cooking

Charles and Joy Green decided to open a small restaurant together a year ago for the very best reason. “My wife, she’s a good cook,” says Charles. So they found an old candy store and converted it into The Green Place Nigeria Restaurant, featuring the homestyle food Joy grew up cooking in Benin City, Nigerian.

 

Her menu includes chicken gizzards smothered in sweet peppers, purple onions and hot Nigerian chilies slow cooked until soft ($10); the fried round doughnuts called “pof pof” ($5, also called puff puff); and meat pies filled with mildly spiced ground beef ($4).

There are also honey beans — so named because they’re sweet, says Joy — served with fried plantains. And there’s a lengthy list of deeply flavored soups like bitter leaf ($15), made with tart greens, goat meat, chilies and smoked fish. It’s more like a stew than a soup, its thick smoky, spicy, tangy sauce meant to be scooped up with a piece of fufu, a sticky, savory cake made from pounding boiled cassava until it’s fluffy.

 

 While Joy is the creator in the kitchen, Charles is an artist too. His airbrush portraits and typography grace signs, motorcycles and metalwork around the city — and the walls of The Green Place.

The Green Place Nigeria Restaurant: 180 Rockaway Ave., near Herkimer St., Brooklyn; (347) 413-6957

Caribbean corner

The long history of the Bed-Stuy West Indian spot now known as Simmer Down is written on its awning: One side still says Jay’s West Indian, the other Finger Lick’n. But no matter the name or the owner, it’s always been a neighborhood go-to for well-prepared Caribbean food.

The current chef is Edsel Craig, who works up a short menu of Jamaican standards each day like saltfish and white beans, fried fish, curry goat, and jerk pork. Don’t miss the collagen-rich stewed oxtails, cooked till tender and sweet. A medium is $10.50, served over rice and beans dressed with more oxtail gravy, or with the flaky West Indian flatbread called roti.

There’s also baked, stewed, curried, BBQ, pineapple, jerk, sweet and sour and fried chicken, the latter best with Jamaican steamed cabbage with carrots, sweet peppers, garlic and onions and, for an extra $1.50, a creamy square of mac and cheese instead of the usual rice and beans. A medium chicken meal — with two large pieces — is $7.50.

Simmer Down: 133 Rockaway Ave., at Fulton St., Brooklyn; (718) 342-6128

Top takeout

It’s easy to spot the good quality Chinese takeout spots in New York — just look for a crew of cooks in the back breaking down whole chickens, filling dumplings and cutting the vegetables by hand. The decades-old Wah Sing Restaurant is one of these, and what it lacks in decor — that’s essentially a bench and some robbery-resistant plexiglass — it makes up for in freshness of flavor.

Good old American-style Chinese food is what to order here, including shrimp egg foo young ($6), served with white rice and thick gravy; sesame chicken with rice and broccoli ($6); or $1.25 egg rolls. Lunch and dinner combos are also key here, like pepper steak with onion for $7, including an egg roll and roast pork fried rice; or a $4.75 lunch combo of chicken chow mein and fried rice.

Wah Sing Restaurant: 143 Rockaway Ave., near Fulton Ave., Brooklyn; (718) 342-6103