More sweet relief

The first photo is my boss-loaned French press. My grounds are too fine to make really good coffee with it (the result is really cloudy), but it's a huge step up over the coffee from the Embassy snack bar.

The rest of the photos are of my other new life-motivator...good pizza!! It's from Black Knight, which is a local chain of coffee shops. The one nearest my place (probably 3/4 mile, around one corner and next to the Melissa market) also has a pizza bakery. Now, as you all know, I'm psychotic about pizza and resolved before I got here that I wouldn't be able to find anything to my standards here. I came to peace with that; it would give me something to look forward to when I get back home.

I've tried pizza from two other places since I've been here. One was at an Italian restaurant called "La Gondola," which had crappy pasta and ok everything else. I tried a slice of my friend's cheese, and it was fine: good enough to eat, not good enough to be excited about. Just standard mozzarella-and-tomato-sauce, thin crust.

The second was at Debonairs, a fast food pizza chain here in Africa. They have a lot of crazy stuff on the menu (see the site), so I opted for the "Margherita," or cheese and diced tomato on crust (but NOT tomato/pizza sauce). It was tolerable, but not worth trying a second time. There's another chain here called the Pizza Inn, but I'm told it's not good and haven't tried. Both, I should say, are walking distance from my house.

Now, for a month now, friends have been recommending that I try the pizza from Black Knight. I dismissed them, thinking it would suck and that I'd try it whenever I got around to it. After a month, I finally tried to go but it was closed the first 2 times I stopped by. Finally, last week I went and they were open, so I ordered a "Margherita" there too.

The pizza is baked in huge clay, brick-fired ovens, which was promising (the best crusts are baked very quickly in VERY high heat). I took mine to go, and when I got home found that it was more of a NYC style pizza, but with GOOD SAUCE and decent aged mozzarella. The crust was great, very yeasty, chewy, and crispy-charred from the fire oven. I'd give it a 6.5 on a scale of 1-10 by my standards, but a 12 by African standards. I was blown away and have been back once more since. Wahoo!!