On the morning of Sept. 22, flames engulfed Jano Ethiopian Restaurant and Lounge, leaving its owners, Worku and Eskedar “Mimi” Abawa, in disbelief. After 20 years of dedication, their passion project, which had become a financial lifeline, was reduced to ashes.
“Your whole world turns upside down,” Worku said. “You can see your dream burning in front of you.”
In the wake of the five-alarm fire, Worku’s life has drastically changed. He and his wife, Eskedar “Mimi” Abawa, who co-owned Jano and Docs Famous Wings, lost both their businesses, marking another challenging chapter for the self-described former refugees.
Over the years, they invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into sustaining the building and buoying the restaurant - an enterprise that paid for three kids’ high school educations, a house in Baltimore County and money to be sent overseas for Ethiopian relatives fleeing violence. But chasing prosperity in this industry has never been easy for the self-described former refugees who, after decades of having to reinvent themselves, are being forced yet again to start over.
Now a cavern of soot filled with about a foot of water from fire hoses, Jano is boarded up and scheduled for demolition. The investigation into the fire is ongoing, according to John Marsh, a spokesman for the Baltimore City Fire Department. He added that fires of this size are rare, with the last “five-alarm” blaze being three years ago.
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The fire not only destroyed the restaurant but also disrupted the neighboring businesses, including Thai Elephant Wok, which suffered moderate damage.
This isn't the type of tour Fikremariam Worku wanted to give, showing us the charred rubble, the ash, and water damage throughout his restaurant - the restaurant he dreamed of opening for most of his adult life.
"People started loving it. We were hoping to be the best vegetarian and Ethiopian restaurant in Baltimore," he told WMAR-2 News' Elizabeth Worthington inside what used to be the dining area.
Jano Ethiopian Restaurant and Lounge on Eutaw Street was one of several buildings impacted by a fire that brought in hundreds of firefighters from five different counties on September 22nd.
"You feel helpless. You feel destroyed," Worku said as he recalled watching his restaurant burn that morning.
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For the last decade, Worku and his wife have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into their dream. He felt like people in the city had just started noticing the restaurant, and their customer base was finally growing.
"People love our food. They were tipping double. They were saying we don’t know why you guys are not known," he told WMAR-2 News. "And we were thinking - next year is gonna be a great year."
He left Saturday night thinking about how to build on that momentum. He woke up to find out he'd have to start all over again.
"I saw my dream getting burned. I could not believe. When the fire trucks were passing me when I was driving here, I said, ‘this does not sound real; this is not my place.’"
Their three children took it especially hard.
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"Because this is the place they grew up," Worku said. His son witnessed the fire; he and his mother came straight to the restaurant from church Sunday morning after they heard the news. "He was crying. He still can’t process it. He kept saying, ‘why, why, why?’" Worku recalled. "We are parents so we are trying to be strong for them. We’re gonna tell them it’s one of our immigrant stories; 20 years ago we came here. We started a life. We built it from nothing. We worked hard, two jobs. And our dream is about to be realized and this happens. We tell them, thank God nobody got hurt. We can do it again."
They don't have to do it alone. A family member started a GoFundMe that's raised over $6,500, and that doesn't include all the phone calls, offers of support, and in one case, even the offer of a job. Worku is extremely grateful. "It makes me believe in humanity again," he said. It also inspires him to keep going - to rebuild. "We are resolute. We know we can do it back because we started from nothing, and we made it here. But it’s gonna be a long road; it’s gonna be hard."
He anticipates it will be at least six months to a year before he can reopen.
Abawa’s feet slosh through the former lounge area on a visit to the building, where she points out a painting of an Ethiopian woman harvesting teff grain for injera, a spongelike bread she uses to transfer some of her favorite foods like misir wat, or Ethiopian red lentils, and doro wat, a spicy chicken stew, into her mouth. “You can’t find this in Baltimore,” she said of the now-stained image, no larger than a laptop, drawn on animal skin.
“It’s from home. We couldn’t figure how to hang it on the wall,” she said. To keep the delicate picture symmetrical with the restaurant’s dozens of tables and wooden sculptures, now floating in a sea of rotted drywall, she had to put holes in the sides and tie it to a frame.
It’s one of many images she brought from Ethiopia to remind her why she first opened a restaurant. Abawa denies being “passionate” about cooking, instead considering it “something you do to live.” But if you ask her about butter, which she spices with coriander and cardamom to clarify sauces, or coffee, which she prepared for her teacher mother in a daily ceremony from the age of 12, you’ll see the truth in her smile.
“I love when people enjoy anything I do, like, here’s something that I love, something from me. … I feel like I’m eating it … Oh I love it. It’s so beautiful,” she said. On lunch breaks while working at Chase Bank, her first job in Baltimore after fleeing Ethiopia, she said the spices from her lunchbox prompted coworkers to walk over aghast. “I was like, oh, this is something different [for them] that I’m eating.”
Worku also beams over the cooking. “She was always a hit,” he said, adding that “everybody tipped almost double” at the restaurant and they “couldn’t believe it was so cheap.”
Abawa, right, and her mother Tsehay Basta, left, shows off a plate of food before fire destroyed the restaurant. (Courtesy of Mimi Worku)
Neither Worku nor Abawa had ever opened an eatery. Abawa was taken with the concept after watching coworkers try her cooking. He had come to the U.S with a master’s in social work, having studied in India and Europe and trained for 25 years in Africa before being forced to leave his home due to his advocacy for human rights.
He claims to have helped up to 9,000 refugees in Baltimore and believes it was part of a calling. He refers to Jano as part of a “second chapter.” “My wife couldn’t do it by herself,” he said.
Worku didn’t give up the advocacy, he said, hiring some of his former refugee clients and members of the local Ethiopian church to help the restaurant on South Eutaw Street. But people didn’t buy in. Customers were scarce and predominantly Ethiopians looking to show support. The location they chose downtown, hoping it would be a hotspot for foot traffic, turned out to be vacant in the day and bustling around midnight.
“I really couldn’t figure it out,” he said, citing a dearth of Ethiopian people in Baltimore compared to Silver Spring and Washington, D.C, which has the largest population of Ethiopians in the United States. A fraction of those thousands of people are scattered around Charm City. Worku noted the numbers are growing - they just didn’t eat at his restaurant, he said, laughing.
It became a marketing issue, he said, so the business pivoted to entertain the late-night crowds looking for a spot to drink for cheap around the neighboring nightlife. Next door to Jano is The Goddess Gentlemen’s Club, Lombard’s Liquor Store and a Thai restaurant, Thai Elephant Wok, which suffered moderate damage.
The charred exterior of Jano and Docs on South Eutaw Street. Other businesses on the block, such as Thai Elephant Wok, were also affected by the blaze. (Ulysses Muñoz/The Baltimore Banner)
The shift in direction was disappointing - Abawa’s blend of Berbere spices were put away in favor of other chefs’ chicken wings for more easy to eat club foods. People became used to seeing Abawa behind the bar, whipping up $6 cocktails. The changes inspired Worku to open the neighboring wing shop, but he said it “never made a penny.”
A former employee of Jano, John Swan, who brought in DJs and promoted the lounge among local artists for seven years, said the club side became “bigger than the Ethiopian food … bigger than we ever thought it would be.” People could drink all night, with a small staff of bottle girls, security and two cooks in the kitchen.
The former tenants of the space already had a reputation as a bar, which Abawa said helped bring in the crowd. “We have to feed our kids and everything, so we just keep doing more,” she said. Over time, some problems emerged: The business incurred multiple liquor license violations, including up to $2,000 fines for failed sanitation inspections and selling liquor to minors.
But in the last six months, Worku said they were trying to bring back Jano’s roots. “I really wanted to go back to [working in] the day time,” Abawa said. A new downstairs space, renovated by the pair in the last three years, inspired them to put efforts back into what they loved, even conjuring plans for a vegetarian and vegan addition.
Worku said the business was also struggling to pay back a more-than-$200,000 small business loan, taken out to help the eatery survive COVID-19. At that time, he said, “we just prayed for a conference [at the convention center across the street].”
He appeared far less concerned about the future than Abawa, who struggled Friday to survey the restaurant’s damage. Warped walls had moved the refrigerator farther into the dining area and many of the hand-carved wooden plaques - a symbol of the Ethiopian church - were left submerged underwater and charred ceiling lamps.
If the darkness or the stench of burning rubber scared him, Worku didn’t show it.
