For decades, occasional morsels in newspaper stories had to suffice to fill our minds rather than our bellies with Ethiopian food until cities had the chance to taste it for themselves. Finally, though, our country’s first Ethiopian restaurant opened in 1966 in Long Beach, Calif.
The owner was Beyene Guililat, a young Ethiopian man who was in this country studying to become a commercial air pilot. It’s a former house converted into a modest dining place which seats 30 in two rooms.
His dinners consist of authentic native dishes, including chicken. Beyene was more of a dreamer than a businessman, so his restaurant only lasted for a few months. Three years later, Beyene revived his Ethiopian Restaurant at 248 W. Washington St. in San Diego, and the San Diego Union wrote about his unique enterprise.
On Jan. 9, 1969, columnist Frank Rhoades published a squib about the restaurant’s impending launch. “The place is being remodeled and Beyen [sic] Gulilat, formerly of Long Beach, has applied for a health card, but job hunters, vendors, etc., can’t find him,” Rhoades wrote. Beyene eventually turned up, and his restaurant opened.
In the newspaper’s March 9, 1969, issue, he told Rhoades that he prepared enough food every day for 40 meals, and he sometimes had to turn people away. “I am not in business to make money,” Beyene said, “only to introduce the culture of my country.
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Meanwhile, on the east coast, The New York Times had begun to discover the cuisine. A 1958 Times piece on tourism in Ethiopia takes readers to dinner at the prime minister’s residence under an enormous tent with “a buffet about a half mile long.” The drinks include vermouth, gin and “the local aquavit” - probably areqe, the Ethiopian ouzo - and the buffet featured raw meat.
On Nov. 19, 1966, Thomas F. Brady’s New York Times story about a conference of African leaders in Addis Ababa describes a state dinner: “Everyone carefully tasted the Ethiopian delicacies - a soft, flat, spongy gray bread that looked like tripe and had a pleasantly sour taste, and a meat stew so highly laced with pepper that the guests had to wash it down with a lot of t’ej, an Ethiopian mead or a fermented drink made of honey and water.
Then, in 1970, The Times published a story about the Kalamazoo Spice Co. in Michigan and its innovative collaboration with farmers in Ethiopia. The company sought new sources of chili peppers and found that the climate of Ethiopia was perfect for growing them.
Eight years later, Selashe and his wife, Workinesh Nega, made Ethiopian-American food history: In Kalamazoo, they created Workinesh Spice Blends, the first company to sell Ethiopian spices and American-grown teff in the United States. Rather than importing her spices from Ethiopia, Workinesh made them herself, growing her company and soliciting business by reaching out to the Ethiopian-American community.
To mark the emperor’s 40th anniversary on the thrown, The Milwaukee Journal published a short wire service story in 1970 by a writer who tried to be playful when he talked about food. At a meal, the writer said, “you sit around tables of ornate basketwork over which your waiter drapes an enormous gray tablecloth (that looks, in fact, rather like foam rubber). Another servant ladles ‘wot’ straight onto the cloth. No fuss and nonsense about plates, knives and forks.
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And then there’s his description of the wine: “You wash [the food] down with a wine that exists nowhere else in the world. It’s called t’ej, and consists of nothing more or less than fermented honey. You drink this straight from the carafe. No glasses.
Little Ardmore, Okla., population 25,000 even today, got a very bad lesson in Ethiopian food in 1967 when The Daily Ardmoreite said farewell to a native daughter about to leave for Ethiopia with the Peace Corps. “She described the bread-like crust called wot,” the newspaper wrote, “which is the staple of the Ethiopian diet.
The town of Reading, Pa., got a taste of Ethiopian food in 1967 when the Reading Eagle interviewed two local people who had just returned home from mission work in Ethiopia. “The basic menu is injera (a large pancake of sour bread) and wot (a highly seasoned stew hotter than Mexican food),” the story explains.
An interesting 1970 Associated Press story that appeared in many newspapers notes a particular aspect of Ethiopian dining that rarely gets mentioned: “One takes a bit of the injera (the pancake) in his right hand (the left is for ‘other things’ and not eating) and captures a bit of wot with it before popping both into the mouth.” This is true: Ethiopians only eat with their right hands, and tearing off a piece of injera with just one hand is a challenge at first.
Craig Claiborne published several lengthy pieces in The New York Times in 1970 that described his encounters with Ethiopian food during his time in Addis Ababa. In one piece, Claiborne talks about injera, wot, t’ej and more, and he offers cooking lessons through the courtesy of Mrs.
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“There are, in general, two reactions to the native food of Ethiopia,” Claiborne wrote. “It is consumed with considerable ardor or eschewed with comparable passion. In the American-European world, it resembles as much as anything the food of Mexico but only in its thoroughgoing use of hot red and green peppers. Most of the main dishes of the Ethiopian kitchen are based on berbere, which is nothing more than dried hot red chilies.
At a meal in the Harrar Grill of the Addis Ababa Hilton, he feasted on yebeg alicha, a “tender lamb dish flavored with bishops weed and saffron”; doro wot, “the Ethiopian chicken and hard cooked egg dish with a light pepper sauce”; and minchet abish, “a ground beef dish that tasted lightly of cinnamon and pepper.” He also had gomen wot, made with spinach and shallots (“delectable”), and t’ej (“fascinating”).
Claiborne eventually made his way to Eritrea, which was then Ethiopia’s northern province, and he noted the strong influence of Italian cuisine in the country, an Italian colony for half a century until the 1940s. They seemed to especially enjoy Ethiopia, where they “sat around a mesob, the traditional woven table that is roughly in the shape of an hour glass. The food, served in a ceremonious manner with honey wine, is placed on a round tray.
The New York Times syndicates its stories, so people across the country read Claiborne’s work as well. Basically, the word wot means a stew. It may be made with meat, poultry, fish or vegetables. These stews are generally elaborately spicy, not only from hot ground peppers, but from other spices such as cardamom, allspice, fenugreek and so on.”
If Southern California had more Ethiopian restaurants after the demise of Beyene’s pioneering 1966 restaurant - along with his 1969 restaurant in San Diego, which also didn’t last long - they kept a low profile. The Los Angeles Times didn’t mention one until more than a decade later, and even after that, the newspaper’s writing about the cuisine is scant through the ’70s.
The city had at least four restaurants by 1981, and in the 1990s, not far from West Pico, a two-block stretch of South Fairfax Avenue had become a gathering place for Ethiopian restaurants and markets, so the city dubbed it Little Ethiopia.
The restaurant’s holiday package offered “traditional Ethiopian dishes plus champagne,” along with “a meat turnover in flaky pastry, salad, roast baby lamb, and vegetables, plus Ethiopian custard baklava.” The turnover is a sambusa, and that last one, a Walia original, is what we might call a cross-cultural diaspora accommodation.
He described the hand-washing ritual at an Addis Ababa restaurant, where “the waiter, at the beginning and end of the meal, brings a brass basin with a cake of soap. Lyons also tells a quick anecdote about Poppy Cannon, an American who visited Addis and went to markets to get supplies “to try to make minchet abish, cheguara alicha, beer and hydromel t’ej.
The next year, The Age had a much more upbeat account of Ethiopian cuisine thanks to Nancy Dexter, who visited the country and wrote about it for the newspaper. “The food?” Dexter begins in her passage about cuisine. She is quick to note, however, that “real tukuls don’t have velvet-covered divans and three-legged stools covered with long black and white monkey fur.
Soon, she was presented with “spoonfuls of curries,” which she ate in the traditional way, grabbing it with injera. “Europeans are easily distinguished by the mess they get into,” she adds. She enjoyed one other meal of Ethiopian food while in Ethiopia, at a birthday party for the mayor of Addis Ababa. “Traditional Ethiopian food includes raw meat,” she writes, “served most untraditionally in small pieces on toothpicks.
With favorites like Lemat Ethiopian Restaurant, Café Colucci, and Addis and more, get ready to experience the best flavors around Berkeley.
Every time I prepare to leave for Ethiopia-my dissertation research takes me to Addis Abeba regularly-I fill up on foods that are hard to find while I’m there. That includes doro tibs from my favorite Oakland Ethiopian restaurant. is made of cubed chicken breast or thigh stir-fried with onions, peppers and spicy berbere. It typifies “Ethiopian food” for many Americans, but it’s nearly impossible to find in Ethiopia.
Tibs can be found throughout Ethiopia with regional variations. Typically, beef or lamb is cut into bite-sized pieces and either fried in oil (called “dry tibs”) or sautéed, often with rosemary and sometimes onions. For Ethiopians who can afford to eat meat and aren’t participating in any religious fasts that prohibit it, tibs is a very popular dish. It’s often eaten at restaurants attached to butcher shops, which typically have restaurants attached where meats are served cooked or raw.
But in the United States, chicken is for everything. and popular with Americans. Eden says doro tibs probably sprung up in the late ’70s and ’80s at Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants in D.C., where a major wave of Ethiopian immigrants began settling in the early 1970s.
While this dish may seem like a simple substitution, its very existence hinged on a conceptual transformation: thinking of tibs not as a set dish but as a method of preparation allowed for the substitution of ingredients. Throughout Ethiopia’s myriad ethnic and regional cuisines, such substitutions have often arisen from significant social or economic shifts.
“As a concept, ‘fusion’ stinks of the imperialist instinct to civilize foreign cultures and rehabilitate them into respectability,” Soleil Ho wrote in a 2017 Taste story. But “assimilation food,” she writes, is the ingenious creativity born out of both necessity and desire to recreate the familiar. Assimilation food is about ownership: “these immigrant dishes are more like culinary fugues, organically building upon a kernel of a memory over the course of generations and developing into a complicated and layered narrative.”
Perhaps an example of assimilation food, doro tibs is one of many transformations Ethiopian cuisine has undergone in the diaspora. Ethiopian lasagna is another, beloved diaspora staple spiced with berbere and layered with mozzarella.
Chef Solomon Tamirue of Oakland’s Ensarro cuts his doro tibs into strips and singes them at their edges with a sweetness that reminds me of fried chicken strips and sweet-and-sour sauce from my American childhood. The jalapeño and berbere heat brings it back to Ethiopia.
In the early days, Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants focused on meat dishes because their mostly Habesha patrons tended to only eat out for meat. According to Ruth Gebreyesus, Mama Desta, the first DC Ethiopian restaurant to gain national prominence in 1978, “didn’t serve a single vegetable dish at that time.”
Today, Ethiopian restaurants are widely considered “vegetarian friendly” for their inclusion of what is often called “veggie combo” (beyaynetu), or the dishes without animal products eaten during Ethiopian Orthodox fasting days.
Ethiopian restaurant food in the US, moreover, only reflects a portion of the culinary and cultural diversity across Ethiopia--namely Habesha cuisine. By the early 90s, an Ethiopian restaurant menu standard had emerged and been cemented as “authentic.” That brought its own problems.
Yet, anything that has deviated from that perceived “authenticity” has had a difficult time gaining traction. There are so many ingredients and grains we have not brought to the mainstream,” says Eden. “I want to encourage young [chefs] to think outside of the box.”
At Ensarro, one of Oakland’s most popular Ethiopian restaurants, Solomon calls the dishes of Ethiopian cuisine “beautiful mistakes” that don’t need any innovation or tweaking. “Me and my mom are creative as hell,” he says, grabbing up pieces of Ensarro’s earthy brown injera made only from teff, as it’s made in Ethiopia.
In Oak Park, Addis Café (818 S. In the middle of March, we purchased a meal-to-go consisting of injera (Ethiopian bread made of the gluten-free teff grain) and five delicious vegan stews that are to be ladled over the injera. This is food that appeals to many different tastes: it’s familiar (beans, potatoes, etc.) and not aggressively spiced. The main challenge, for gringos like us, is probably to get used to eating with the hands, the way it’s done in Ethiopia.
Tesfaye tells us, “I grew up in Ethiopia and lived there until high school. Then we moved to the Bay Area, where I owned a restaurant in Oakland. My mother used to cook a lot, and I learned a lot from her. She lives in Ethiopia, and she still calls to make sure I’m putting the right spices in the food.
With more than forty years’ worth of offerings, there’s certainly no shortage of spots where you can score a smorgasbord of injera-plated, berbere-spiced proteins and veggies - awaze tibs (spiced lamb), shiro wat (chickpea stew), dulet (minced liver or beef).
Addis Ethiopian RestaurantA traditional sit down in North Oakland with a touch of old school elegance. That’s not to say it isn’t homestyle - even the most basic Ethiopian eats here pack a nuanced, slow-cooked punch. The katanga (crispy injera rolled up with Ethiopian-spiced butter) and beef kitfo sliders are a must.
The herb-oil infused tofu tibs and zucchini wot (sauteed in a medley of spices and veggies) also make it an ideal spot for vegetarians and vegans alike. Driven by an organic, from-the-source approach, the restaurant helped to establish Ethiopian vegan food in the region with local-sourced ingredients and fresh spices imported directly from Ethiopia by Brundo, an Ethiopian spice shop that is housed inside the cafe.
A ghost kitchen that operates inside of Lizzy’s Cajun Cafe, they offer a mouthwatering buticha - a highly shareable bowl of hummus-like dip made from chickpea, olive oil, onions and jalapeño. You can top off with an order of beyaynetu, a colorful Ethiopian assortment served on a bed of sour injera.
As the oldest, still-running restaurant of its kind in the region, you’ll find Eritrean and Ethiopian delights with a perfectly calibrated balance (see: Ye-Beg Alicha, a curry lamb stew).
The Menu at Addis Ethiopian Restaurant
Here is a glimpse into the menu offerings at Addis Ethiopian Restaurant, showcasing the variety and flavors of Ethiopian cuisine:
| Dish | Description |
|---|---|
| Katanga | Crispy injera rolled up with Ethiopian-spiced butter |
| Beef Kitfo Sliders | Sliders made with traditional Ethiopian kitfo |
| Tofu Tibs | Tofu sauteed in herb-infused oil |
| Zucchini Wot | Zucchini sauteed in a medley of spices and veggies |
| Buticha | Hummus-like dip made from chickpea, olive oil, onions, and jalapeño |
| Beyaynetu | Colorful Ethiopian assortment served on a bed of sour injera |
These dishes reflect the restaurant's commitment to using local-sourced ingredients and fresh spices imported directly from Ethiopia, providing a unique and authentic dining experience.
