At Long Last, New Yorkers' Appetites Are Ready for Ethiopia

"The brick and ocher walls glowed softly in the low lights, the place was packed with a good-looking crowd, and the chef was making the rounds, kissing familiar faces and asking if everybody was happy. But nobody at this new restaurant was praising the foie gras or the tuna steak. Here at Queen of Sheba, which opened just a week ago in Clinton, the crowd had turned out for fine Ethiopian fare: beef and lamb stews flavored with a rousing dark-red hot sauce, and wonderful vegetarian dishes seasoned with complex spice blends, all eaten not with forks but with pieces of injera, a spongy flat bread with the enticing flavor of sourdough

Queen of Sheba, though the newest Ethiopian restaurant in New York, was not the only one getting attention last weekend. Ethiopian restaurants around Manhattan were crowded, with mixtures of families, university students, Ethiopians and Jamaicans, many of whom venerate Haile Selassie by his given name, Ras Tafari.

"Popular?" said Philipos Mengistu, the owner and chef of Queen of Sheba. "That's why I opened in Midtown. The market is there, meaning people are getting addicted."

For years, Ethiopian restaurants have been relegated to the edges of New York's restaurant menu, stereotyped as low-priced campus favorites where young people on meager budgets braved squat wooden stools and flimsy tables to scoop up stews with bread and fingers. But slowly, with three new Ethiopian restaurants opening in the last year in Manhattan, this bedeviling image is changing as New Yorkers are opening themselves to the pleasures of this unusual cuisine.

This may be a signal moment for Ethiopian restaurants in New York. Diners are now knowledgeable and curious enough to appreciate the cooking and its traditions, and Ethiopian restaurateurs have been in New York long enough to know how to appeal to Americans, encouraging them to try eating with injera from big central platters but also offering flatware and individual servings if diners are uncomfortable. And, most important, Ethiopian cooks now have access to essential ingredients, like teff flour for making injera, and peppers and spices for making berbere (pronounced bear-BEAR-ee), the hot sauce.

"The quality of the products here is higher, and the people who make the food are from Ethiopia," said Marcus Samuelsson, the chef at the Swedish restaurant Aquavit, who is Ethiopian by birth and grew up in Sweden. "So in America, you now have the opportunity to have the best Ethiopian food in the world."

Unlike the food of almost any other country, Ethiopian cuisine has grown in a vacuum, undiluted by outside forces. Its mountainous geography kept it largely isolated from its neighbors, and unlike other African countries, Ethiopia escaped European domination, except for a five-year Italian occupation under Mussolini. Only its position as a stop on ancient trade routes brought Ethiopia the cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, fenugreek, turmeric and other spices that are used so creatively.

"No other culture has come into the country to introduce new food," said Yeworkwoha Ephrem, whose restaurant, Ghenet, has drawn a steady stream of diners since she opened in NoLIta in 1998. "We isolated ourselves culturally, and our food has not been infused by either European or Asian cuisines."

Ms. Ephrem's success with Ghenet is strikingly different from her experience with her first restaurant, Sheba, which she opened on Hudson Street in 1979. Back then she had to settle for poor substitutes, like pancake flour to make injera. Americans were apprehensive about unfamiliar traditions, less willing to try new things. By 1984, Sheba had closed.

Now, teff, the ancient, extremely nutritious grain from which injera is made, is grown and milled in Idaho, where the Teff Company sells it to Ethiopians nationwide. Her berbere is flown in from Ethiopia, and diners delight in everything from the spicy, almost granular miser wot, a lentil stew with flavors that build in the mouth, to yebeg alecha, a deliciously mild lamb stew.

"The taste of the food is a big difference, and people have opened up," she said, somewhat in wonder. "Things have changed tremendously."

Aside from Queen of Sheba, the other Ethiopian restaurants that have opened in Manhattan in the last year are Meskerem and Caffè Adulis. Meskerem on Macdougal Street, a sibling of Meskerem on West 47th Street, opened last summer with the sort of simple décor and brick walls characteristic of so many other Village restaurants. But the second restaurant, Caffè Adulis, is a significant departure from the others. With its hosts in ties and jackets, a comfortable wood-paneled ambience, an extensive wine list and a fusion menu based on the cuisine of Eritrea, a coastal region that gained its independence in 1993 after a long civil war, Adulis is the first East African entry into the New York fine dining world.

Even so, there may be no more than a dozen Ethiopian restaurants in the city, a result of the small population of Ethiopians in New York — 2,500 in 2000, according to the City Planning Department — and the fact that Americans know very little about any African cuisine. Mr. Samuelsson attributes this to the low level of trade and tourism between Africa and the United States.

"Until we started to buy Sony and other Japanese products, we didn't eat sushi," he said. "If we don't trade with eastern Africa, how will we learn about the food?"

Mr. Samuelsson, who was adopted by a Swedish family at age 3, has no conscious memory of his early childhood. But since he came to New York in 1994 he has acquainted himself intimately with Ethiopian cuisine and has traveled to Ethiopia with Ms. Ephrem, who served as his culinary guide. He has even added some Ethiopian touches to his menu at Aquavit, using shiro, a chickpea flour, with smoked salmon; curing duck with tej, the Ethiopian honey wine; or serving injera with hors d'oeuvres.

"They're so many great things that people can use," Mr. Samuelsson said. "The food is based on very high flavors."

The traditional Ethiopian menu is heavy with beef, lamb and chicken. Yet, because the country is made up mostly of Christians and Muslims who observe many meatless days, it also has a wonderful and extensive vegetarian selection, centered on lentils, split peas, cabbage, beans and greens like collards and kale.

Seasonings are crucial, with mountain- grown chili peppers combining with ginger, garlic, onions, spices, basil and a host of less familiar flavorings like bishop's weed, which resembles thyme, and false banana powder, which comes from a source that looks like a banana tree but bears no fruit. The flavorings are usually cooked slowly in kibe, a clarified butter similar to the Indian ghee. One thing almost never found in Ethiopian food is sugar.

To say that Ethiopian food can be spicy enough to set a rosy glow to the sinuses and mouth is like noting that French chefs use sauces, yet as with most things Ethiopian, it's not nearly that simple. Hot berbere paste and its spicy relatives awaze and mitmitta are integral to many recipes, yet different dishes have carefully calibrated degrees of fire, and some dishes, made without hot sauce and called alecha, are mild enough for the most sensitive palates.

Pulling all the disparate elements together is the injera, the spongy fermented bread imprinted with bubbles that tastes faintly of sourdough and resembles huge crepes. Almost every Ethiopian restaurant offers combination plates, perfect for first-timers and preferred by some veterans for tasting a spectrum of meat and vegetable dishes, from atikilt wot, a spicy stew of green beans, carrots and cabbage, to yebeg alecha, a mild lamb stew. It's helpful to remember that the word wot, which rhymes with hot, indicates that a dish is just that, while alecha means that a dish is mild.

Ethiopian food is served on centerpiece platters over injera, accompanied by plates of more injera, rolled up like so many dish towels. To eat, you simply tear off pieces of injera and scoop up bites of food. With practice comes deftness, and eventually you can strip the meat off a drumstick, bite by bite, using injera.

One thing immediately apparent after visiting most of New York's Ethiopian restaurants is the similarity of the menus. "As with any third world country's food, it doesn't have tiers of sophistication," Mr. Samuelsson said. "It doesn't matter if you're the richest or the poorest, you're going to eat the same food, except that maybe the quality of the meat changes."

Eventually, though, you begin to notice subtle differences among the restaurants. Awash, a small but crowded restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue near 109th Street, excels at both vegetarian dishes and at kitfo, a raw beef delicacy invariably referred to as Ethiopian steak tartare. Massawa, on Amsterdam Avenue near 121st, has a selection of shrimp dishes, indicating a coastal Eritrean heritage (Ethiopia itself is landlocked). Zula, a block away from Massawa, is known for its shiro wot, a spicy chickpea stew, while Meskerem has excellent injera and fine doro wot, a spicy chicken stew topped with hard-cooked eggs that comes close to being the national dish of Ethiopia.

At Ghenet, Ms. Ephrem is unparalleled in her willingness to discuss the food and culture of Ethiopia with anybody who doesn't know tibs from wots, that is, cooked meat dishes from spicy stews. Until Queen of Sheba opened, only Ghenet served kategna, injera coated with kibe and hot sauce, and toasted into a wonderful garlicky appetizer. The place has also adapted Ghenet's friendly, flexible approach.

It's not yet clear how people have taken to the Eritrean fusion cuisine offered at Caffè Adulis, which is the New York branch of a restaurant that has been thriving in New Haven since 1992. Adulis, practically hidden beneath huge scaffolding, was practically empty for lunch one day last week, though the three brothers who own the restaurant, Ficre, Gideon and Sahle Ghebreyesus, say they do well in the evenings, especially with former Yalies who remember their cooking.

Ficre Ghebreyesus, the chef, stays true to the spirit of Eritrean and Ethiopian spicing, though he does step beyond traditional bounds, flavoring the injera with beets, lime, berbere or even pesto. Instead of serving meat cooked on the bone for long periods, Mr. Ghebreyesus likes to use the sort of boneless cuts more familiar to upscale customers, and he sautés them quickly. "Cooking is one of the ways I reconciled my being away from home," said Mr. Ghebreyesus, who came to the United States at 18. "I try to recreate the dishes of home, but within the present tense."

His specialties include an appetizer of shrimp seared with tomato and cabbage and served in a spicy cream sauce. It goes beautifully with injera of any flavor, to say nothing of a crisp Chablis from Louis Michel. Mr. Ghebreyesus uses mint and lime to augment a dish of braised cubes of filet mignon with berbere, based on the Ethiopian tibs. He calls this Afro-Asian Ensemble.

"You have to be willing to let go of some of your traditions," he said. "You should recognize the good influences that come your way. Culture benefits that way."

Eric Asimov
The New York Times
February 28, 2001