Ode to Café Ethiopia
A setting sun, casting a final light on our time to dine,
Beloved friends gather, us minyan of nine.
Laughter and happiness at the evening ahead,
Joy at the food, ahh how exotic as the menu is read.
Ordering briskly, honey and Harar consumed by the glass,
Delighting in conversation, not wanting this time to pass.
Bonding and sharing, our hands do devour,
Delighting in tastes and textures, we get lost in the hours.
Ethiopia, you have charmed us, and your food is your power.
We never really set out a scorecard or standards for our club; for us it is not about choosing the expensive, the trendy or the stylish or the new. It is about finding a place we have never been to before and enjoying the experience together.
In fact above everything else, our eating club is about friends getting together, whiling away the hours chatting about our lives over some great food and drinks. For us it is an ongoing emotional experience of bonding and of course eating great food as we do it.
The food – well that is all about a sensory experience – the taste, sight and smell of our foods, intermingled with our conversation is what makes these moments so great. So what has this got to do with the review you may ask? Well this time round we added another incredible dimension to our eating experience – to taste, sight and smell we added touch!
And that brings us to Café Ethiopia.
Café Ethiopia is a small and simply laid out restaurant in a slightly run-down part of the very hip and trendy Valencia Street. Once through the doors and seated, you are transported into a mellow, friendly place, where the service is prompt, but not rushed. The staff is friendly, and always had a smile on their faces.
As I hinted about above, touch is important to Ethiopian dining, because there is no silverware – you are not given knives, forks and spoons – we used our fingers and more precisely we used Ingera to eat our food. Ingera is traditional Ethiopian soft flat bread. The bread is thin grey and spongy in texture. Eaten alone it tastes a bit like sour dough.
Another key feature, and one that suited our group bonding, is that eating Ethiopian food is characterized by eating off the same plate. In Ethiopia this is a sign of friendship and loyalty. For us it added to the sensory and sensual experience of our meal. So we went family style and ordered a range of dishes, most of which were centered around Tsebhi, which is effectively an Ethiopian stew made around a core peppery and delicious sauce known as berbere. It is available with a variety of different meat and vegetarian ingredients. We are a mixed bag of folks – omnivores and vegetarians alike, and fortunately Café Ethiopia catered well for all of us.
We ate using the Inegera – we would break of smallish bite-sized pieces of the soft, chewy flat bread and scoop up the food. It was a fun, sensory and maybe just a little bit of a messy experience, and one I would highly recommend as it gets you completely engaged not just in the food, it also gets you talking about the food and eating experience. You cannot help but to laugh and smile as you try to scoop up a different selection or ask someone to pass a plate over. This was family style at its best.
We ordered a range of dishes including: Tsebhi Derho, which are chicken drumsticks simmered in Berbere (hot Pepper) sauce, so really an Ethiopian equivalent of hot-wings and wehre very tasty. We ordered a range of beef dishes including Tibsie (Sega Tibs) – these are beef cubes sautéed in a spicy sauce with butter onions and tomatoes, Gored Gored and Zigni which are both spicy beef dishes. All of them were great, although I think the Tibsie was particularly delicious.
The ordering went on…. we had a lamb dish called Lamb Tsebhi Begee which was probably my favorite of the dishes we ordered, being tender, spicy and incredibly tasty, Tibsie Shrimp.
And the ordering went on a bit more…. Ordering a range of vegetarian dishes including Bersin which is a lentil based dish made with with berbere sauce, We also ordered Hamli, a traditional chopped collard greens dish sautéed with onions & seasoning, and a Chopped spinach, dish made with potatoes sautéed and Seasoned. I am sure we ordered several other dishes too .
For drinks we ranged from the incredibly sweet traditional Ethiopian Honey wine, which while I was not keen on, several of us loved, to a range of traditional Ethiopian beers.
I think we ordered practically one or several of every meat dish as well as a good selection of vegetarian dishes. Almost all of the foods were stew like, a little bit messy – in a fun way – to eat and encourage us engage in vibrant conversation.
The selections we ordered ranged from absolutely delicious in taste to just ok, and overall we had a great, fun, sensory and sensual dining experience. We are already a chatty group, and the nature of the dining experience – being communal and shared encouraged us to be even more vocal and engaged. It seemed that the whole act of sharing and using our fingers to eat encouraged increased communication, warmth and laughter. For that alone I would highly rate Café Ethiopia.
We ordered a lot of food, in reality way more than nine folks would normally order, and in some cases we ordered seconds – and by the end of the evening we had eaten practically everything. We left Café Ethiopia happy, sated and looking for a place to go and drink and dance. It was a great and successful evening.
In conclusion, I recommend Café Ethiopia and this is something I would definitely visit again, especially if you are going to go out with a group of friends.
Café Ethiopia can be found at:
878 Valencia St
San Francisco,
CA 94110
ph: 415-285-2728
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