SABA’S ETHIOPIAN RESTAURANT, VIC
Tekebash Gebre & Saba Alemayoh
Opening a restaurant was never a part of Saba Alemayoh’s plan, but for her mother, Tekebash Gebre, it was the dream. What brought their paths together – and brought a smart Ethiopian restaurant into being – was a sudden craze in Melbourne for the Ethiopian grain teff. Alemayoh had been looking for ways to make use of her entrepreneurial skills following a stint as an officer in the Army Reserve, while simultaneously studying business and arts at Monash University. She’d been working as an employee-wellbeing consultant when she started to notice a lot of talk about this
“new” ancient grain superfood, teff (the gluten-free base ingredient for injera bread), and the difficulty people were having sourcing it.
“So I started importing teff into Australia from Ethiopia and selling it to health-food stores,” she says. “But then I realised not many people knew how to use it properly and so I saw that, to grow the business, I’d have to start educating people on how to cook with it. We started doing markets and then picked up some catering jobs and then more catering jobs and then one day I thought: oh, a restaurant is where we need to be.”
Alemayoh’s mother is a great cook and had always wanted her own restaurant, but had hesitated, not feeling comfortable negotiating the front of house or the inevitable paperwork with her limited English. So when Alemayoh approached her with the idea of doing the restaurant together with Gebre as full-time chef, Saba’s was born.
It quickly became more than a mother-daughter affair. A cousin who had recently arrived from the Netherlands agreed to help out in the kitchen and became a valued second chef while Alemayoh’s younger sister, Sara, though still at school, worked weekend shifts. Alemayoh says that there are particular challenges working with family. “My mum doesn’t have a lot of care factor when it comes to speed,” she says. “She is very meticulous in the way she wants things done, is not good at delegating and is a very, very neat chef. As a result, she slows things down. I have a restaurant full of hungry people and the food’s not coming out of the kitchen fast enough, but you just have to manage that.”
It can get fiery, but that’s where the advantage of working with family comes in. “Mum and I fight every shift, but it’s okay, because it happens quickly – it’s there and then it’s done and 30 seconds later it’s forgotten,” says Alemayoh. “That’s the great thing about working with family – you can have these flare-ups and you don’t have to deal with HR. We usually have dinner together at the end of the night and talk about other stuff.”
As Alemayoh sees it, working with family is all about the art of compromise. “When your mother’s the head chef, it can be difficult to change things, to implement certain things that I’ve learnt or experienced through a Western kitchen that would be better, more proficient and productive,” she says. “But sometimes you just have to let that go and let the kitchen dictate the pace to keep the peace.”
Saba’s Ethiopian Restaurant, 328 Brunswick St, Fitzroy, Vic,
(03) 8589 0442, sabasethiopianrestaurant.com