Washington, D.C. – On a picture-perfect sunny Sunday, we met at a place called Meskerem in the Adams Morgan section of northwest Washington. There are 100,000 Ethiopians and 17 Ethiopian restaurants in the city, and it appeared Adams Morgan is the community’s nerve center. I passed an Eritrean souvenir store, an African art and jewelry store called Oya’s Mini Bazaar, and Queen’s Cafe & Hookah.
I don’t think downtown Addis Ababa has a store called Shake Your Booty. (It’s a boot store, not a strip joint. Calm down.)
Ambassador Kassahun Ayele greeted me upstairs in the airy, tastefully decorated two-story restaurant, adorned with Ethiopian musical instruments. Ethiopian waitresses scurried around with huge trays of food. He was accompanied by Mesfin Endrias, his press attaché; Bekri Nuru, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Nafisa Said; and Naile Geriges, the restaurant’s consultant.
Ayele, 56, is short and stout, and he looked regal in a jet-black suit and blue-and-white striped tie. He adjusted his mod glasses as we sat on stools next to a large, low, round table. I could smell expensive cologne when I asked about the authenticity of Ethiopian food in the city.
“It’s getting pretty close now,” the British-educated Ayele said in impeccable English. “Moreover, restaurants here are trying to have the food taste suitable for people who are not used to it, like you guys.”
He let out a hearty laugh when I ordered a bottle of tej, Ethiopia’s sweet honey wine. I doubt he drinks much at lunch. Then again, I doubt he ever had lunch with a sportswriter. I added “letenachin” (“for your health” in Amharic) to my long list of foreign-language toasts.
For those who have never tried Ethiopian food, know that it’s the only cuisine in which you eat the proverbial tablecloth. The food, a collage of meats, vegetables and cheeses, comes separated on injera, a flat, doughy bread spread across a giant round tray. You take pieces of the injera, pick up chunks of food and plop them in your mouth. No worries about dropping the silverware. There isn’t any.
The challenge Ethiopian restaurants everywhere have is that injera is made from tef, a tiny grain from a grass-type plant found in Ethiopia. Those that have used substitutes fail.
“I’ve been here for 3 1/2 years,” Ayele said. “When I was here in the beginning, the quality was not that good. It was not as good as it is today. I’m talking about the injera, but the other things that go with it – the sauce, the vegetables, all the other ingredients – are quite good. In some cases they are better than what we have at home.”
A raven-haired waitress named Yodit brought out our tray – a kaleidoscope of browns, reds, oranges, whites and yellows. Nuru patiently explained them all. There were the sambus, little triangle cheese pies; doro watt, the trademark Ethiopian chicken dish; alicha watt, a meat dish in rich, heavy sauce; kay watt, similar, but the hot sauce could torch a sofa; yellow split peas; hot lentil sauce; collard greens with potatoes; shrimp with carrots; tomato salad; cabbage with carrots; and a few other concoctions totally beyond my comprehension.
I looked at the massive amount and immediately canceled dinner plans for that night. And the next. My favorite was the kitfo, minced beef dipped in an amazing sauce of milled pepper thickened with honey wine, butter and spices. The doro wat was superb, with the chicken meat falling off the bone. The injera was soft, gooey and tangy. It was like eating an Ethiopian sourdough sandwich.
“The problem with a lot of restaurants is a family decides to open a restaurant in, say, Denver or Oakland,” Geriges said. “They have no concept of how it should be done, because back home they had a maid cooking for them. I’ve been here for 36 years and I’ve been through all kinds of restaurants, and you get some restaurants that serve very, very bad food.”
This wasn’t like that. It was tasty, fun and healthy, which brought up my favorite subject. Mr. Ambassador, what do you think of our country’s obesity problem?
“I’m really scared,” he said. “I came to know about the seriousness of this problem at a conference recently in Des Moines. There was this international conference on food and hunger recently. In one of the sessions, the problem of obesity was discussed and, interestingly, the governor of the state had a problem of overweight. He lost his weight very successfully. He wrote a book.”
As he spoke, his country 7,000 miles away had just put down a revolt between loyalists to prime minister Meles Zenawi and residents upset over elections. Four people were killed. Ayele grew somber, but he remains optimistic for his country. We raised our glasses one final time to Ethiopian food and the planet.
Letenachin.
Staff writer John Henderson can be reached at 303-820-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
