First, a snack: asun, dark, smoky goat meat sifted with what looks like crimson dust and proves to be Scotch bonnets, smashed into powder and weaponized. This is a fine thing to gnaw on the sidewalk, mouth burning, by a food truck with bright green hubcaps and a beach scene with silhouetted palms on its flank.

In Nigeria, the goat would come with the skin still on. “It has to,” said Godshelter Oluwalogbon, the chef behind the Divine Flavored Nigerian Food Truck, which parks weekdays in front of the Nigerian Consulate, a few blocks east of Grand Central Terminal. But the version he serves here is skinless, he said with a sigh: “For the general public, we have to make accommodations.”

Fortunately, those accommodations are few. It’s rare that the general public has a chance to encounter, on the streets of Midtown Manhattan, the likes of gizdodo, chicken gizzards boiled just short of tender, then fried with Scotch bonnets and red onions and folded with dodo, plantains caramelized in curry powder and thyme: gooey, sugary and meaty, all at once.

Or moi moi, malleable bundles the texture of mashed potatoes, made of honey beans dismantled by soaking overnight. Steamed in foil, they taste of the sea, contoured in brine from dried shrimp and sardines, with buried slivers of hard-boiled eggs.