To celebrate our 17th anniversary, my wife and I finally made it to a restaurant we had always wanted to try: Jiko – The Cooking Place (https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/dining/animal-kingdom-lodge/jiko-the-cooking-place/menus/dinner/). Jiko is a high-end African restaurant located inside the sumptuous Animal Kingdom Lodge hotel at Walt Disney World, so you don’t need to pay admission to enter the Animal Kingdom theme park to eat there. I strongly encourage diners to make a reservation, though.
This was a real splurge meal, with each of us ordering an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert, and it wasn’t even Magical Dining! We don’t do that very often, but anniversaries only come once a year, and we had a lot to celebrate, including my wife surviving a near-death experience (with an extended hospitalization) this past summer.
I’ll never turn down bread being delivered to our table, and Jiko specliazes in giraffe bread, soft and fluffy and slightly chewy on the inside, but the exterior has these beautiful crispy, crunchy patterns that make it delightful and fun to eat. The soft whipped butter is blended with baobab, a gourd-like fruit that naturally dries on the branches of gigantic African trees known as the “tree of life.” It gives the butter a tangy, slightly sour taste, which I thought was yogurt at first.
For her appetizer, my wife chose this duck confit and honey-raisin flatbread, not that dissimilar from a small, thin-crust pizza, topped with preserved duck, arugula (it’s a veg-e-table!), toasted chickpeas, mozzarella cheese, raisins, harissa (the Moroccan spice that explains it all), and spiced honey.
I almost didn’t order an app for myself, but we both had our eyes on the braii’d wild boar tenderloin, so I’m really glad I splurged just a little bit more than I intended at first. (A braii is a South African wood or charcoal grill, or the style of grilling meats, comparable to how Americans barbecue meats at low heat for a long time, using smoke.) We both love game meats, which will be a trend throughout this sumptuous feast. The wild boar was extremely tender, and it was served on top of creamy pap (very similar to grits or polenta, but with a smoother, creamier consistency), tomato chakalaka (a South African relish made with tomatoes, onions, carrots, garlic, and ginger), and drizzled with herb-smoked oil. That intriguing bubbly thing on the left was a crispy pork rind, but more cracker-like than super-crunchy and hard like some chicharrones.
The game meats continued. My deer… um, dear wife ordered seared venison loin, which the chef at Jiko cooks to medium rare. It was so tender, and she has a happy childhood memory of trying venison in her kindergarten class when a kid’s father, a hunter, brought some in for the kids to sample, and she loved it. This venison was served over herbed goat cheese pap (again, similar to grits or polenta), topped with chermoula, a North African marinade or relish similar to Latin chimichurri. The menu said it was supposed to come with petite mustard greens, but I’m not sure if that was the bit of green on top, or if that was the chermoula.
One thing the venison loin dish included that the menu did not mention was a whole pile of mushrooms, on the left side of the plate, next to the frizzy, leafy garnish. I’m glad I didn’t spear one of those when she invited me to try anything on her plate, or it would have cut our lovely date night tragically short!
I ordered her second choice of entrees, but these two were my top two as well. This was oak-grilled braai bison strip, which I requested rare. I love making little sliders out of ground bison, and I always cook it rare at home. It has such a rich, beefy taste, but I had never had actual bison steak before, until this dish. It was delicious, especially topped with chocolate-red wine demi-glace, but it wasn’t as tender as the venison loin she ordered.
It came with four-cheese macaroni that I had been excited about, since I usually love mac and cheese, but that was a letdown for both of us. It looked and tasted like something simple, off the chidrens’ menu, without anything to make it special or unique or exciting. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all. There was a roasted tomato slice topped with some kind of herbs and a bit of roasted red onion, but right below that tomato was… guess what, folks… another pile of mushrooms that nobody mentioned! Perhaps those were the “seasonal vegetable,” even though mushrooms are not vegetables or even plants. My wife mentioned it to our server, who offered to remake the plate, but I didn’t want that food to be wasted. My wife ate all the mushrooms, and at least I’m not going to be poisoned if they touched my plate or even my other food — I just can’t eat them myself. (Man, now all my enemies know how to incapacitate me, like how every supervillain in the DC Universe knows about Kryptonite!)For dessert, my wife chose the potjie pot, a beautiful, multicolored, sphere-like sculpture containing layers of lemon-olive oil cake at the bottom, chocolate custard in the middle, whipped caramel on top, cocoa nib crunch like a fascinator hat on top and around the base, and some dark cherries. The little “happy anniversary” sign was made of paper-thin chocolate.
And I had no intention of getting a dessert, but with my wife’s newfound love of food and trying new things, I figured it was a rare opportunity to sample something else. Our server, Susanna (from Rome, Italy) suggested her other favorite was the malva pudding, a South African dessert of amarula-infused malva cake, caramel-sea salt gelato, kataifi (super-fine, crispy strands of phyllo dough), dark chocolate ganache, and drops of sweet shiraz gelée around the plate. That “flying V” shape on the top was also paper-thin chocolate, along with the anniversary sign.
Our little area of the dining room was walled off, so we couldn’t see any of the African animals out the windows, and then it was dark by the time we finished dinner, but oh well. We dressed up because it was a special occasion at an upscale restaurant, but most diners showed up in t-shirts and shorts, drenched in sweat, presumably after a day at the parks, so keep in mind that dress codes are nonexistent.
All in all, we had a beautiful anniversary dinner at Jiko, even with surprise mushrooms and disappointing macaroni and cheese. But we both agreed this was a “one-and-done” for us, a singular experience we wouldn’t need to repeat, much like Bern’s Steak House in Tampa (which we liked) and other expensive Disney restaurants like California Grill and The Boathouse (which we did not).
