Kinshasa - Gombe / The Taj and Forescom

I've wanted to post these photos side by side for a while. The first photo I found on a website that a friend circulated, and was taken as part of a series of postcards of Leopoldville, as Kinshasa was known before the country's independence from Belgium in 1960.



Here you can see the building from which the photo was taken.

The present-day photo I intended to get during daylight, but I never had the gumption to find out if I could ascend to the top floor of the Forescom building, since it was not clear what was there or to whom it belonged. It turns out to have businesses on the first floor and some apartments on the other seven floors.

Back in June or July of last year, an Indian restaurant opened up on the top floor, giving me the opportunity to legitimately take the photo, albeit at night.

In Kinshasa, there were three Indian places we would frequent. Chez Nawab was newer, located on Boulevard 30 Juin, and had outdoor seating in a large compound. Their fare was usually set up as a buffet, with several salads, meat dishes, and veggie options, plus a grill where they would cook chicken and red meat on skewers. They may have had a menu, but I never ordered from it.

Another was at the Cercle Asiatique, or the Asian Club. They had tennis courts, a pool, outdoor and indoor seating, and yummy masala dosa. One day, I was told that the owner had decided to close the club and donate all his land to an effort to build a mosque on that site, a proposition that I found vaguely absurd. Several months went by and we were still cheerily stopping in periodically for masala dosa, until one day when the parking lot gates were chained shut, and I noticed that the entire cement basketball court had been dug up and building materials were strewn all over the old parking lot.

Our other standby was the Taj. The Taj used to have another location in Gombe that suffered from a fire, and the management happened to run the not-so-successful European-style restaurant in Le Paris Hotel as well. So, since the Taj was now homeless, and the other restaurant needed a boost, the Taj usurped Le Paris. This meant that some of the decor was changed out in favor of a south Asian flavor, though the tables, napkins, silverwear, and maroon walls past the dark wooden bar were still distinctly European.

They didn't serve masala dosa, but we went there for palaag paneer, naan, and a mysterious dish whose equivalent I know not, called Butter Chicken. One day, a group of 10 of us sat down to dinner and ordered. Two hours later, we were told that they had had to get someone in to fix the stove, which was why our food was late. When they brought out the food, there was no naan, because by the way, the naan maker was broken and they hadn't been able to fix it. I noticed that our trusty waiter who always knew our order was nowhere to be seen, either. Changes were afoot.

Quite by accident, one of my colleagues looked up while traversing the roundabout at Forescom and glimpsed the banner announcing the opening of the new location of the Taj. As soon as we could plan an outing, we went there for dinner. Once we parked and made our way to the elevator, it was clear that we were in the right location. Our trusty parking attendant/door man was there, in his odd uniform of maroon and gold, belted and with epaulettes, worn over his everyday jeans and tennis shoes.

He ushered us into the elevator cabin, pushed the button for the 8th floor, let the door open and close when we stopped at the 4th floor, and again on the 6th. (It's very important to have a guide in Kinshasa who knows the intricacies of getting you where you want to go.) We walked into the New Taj (the Taj was now the Old Taj, in the location at Le Paris, and the Old Taj, which had burned down, was now the Old Old Taj) up a slightly spiral staircase to the top suite, which boasted a lounge area with a linoleum dance floor and a DJ. There were dinner tables there, as well as out on the balcony.

Our trusty waiter was there, waiting to take our order, which was almost always the same. And, I enjoyed the miraculously cool breeze on the 8th floor while I took this photo.