Treichville is a neighborhood in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, that bustles with open-air markets, transportation terminals, and nightclubs that commence at midnight and pulsate till dawn. It's the poorest and most African part of a city that likes to think of itself as modern and French. Treichville is also the name of New York's only full-blown Ivory Coast restaurant, with an ambitious menu that effortlessly mixes traditional African fare with all sorts of French flourishes. Evidence of this commingling is pepe soup de poisson. Nominally, it's a West African pepper soup—a scalding scarlet concoction, sometimes boasting a piece of tough mutton or slab of smoky stockfish, that I've enjoyed at a Cameroonian carryout in Washington, D.C.; a Ghanaian strip-mall café in Houston; and ladled from a Nigerian lunch wagon just north of Chicago's loop. The version at Treichville, however, is much more bountiful, bristling with crab legs, mussels, clams, shrimp, and hunks of whole fish, including an ugly catfish head sprouting feelers around its mouth, imparting a marvelous gluey texture to the broth. In short, Treichville's seafood pepper soup ($9) is the city's best... More >>>