Ethiopian cuisine is unlike any other. Why?
TWO SUMMERS ago, as part of owner Sileshi Alifom’s on- going campaign to refine his food at the white-tablecloth Das Ethiopian Cuisine in Washington, he attempted to create an East African lasagna.
Semi-frozen sections of injera, the fermented Ethiopian flatbread, served as his noodles, which Alifom layered with a yellow split-pea puree, collard greens, red-lentil stew and a mild cheese, all flavours native to his mother country.
While unorthodox, the Ethiopian lasagna does have a foundation in East African cooking.
Neighbouring Eritrea was an Italian colony for decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Italians, under Benito Mussolini, occupied Ethiopia from 1936 to 1941.
Italian food and drink left a permanent mark on both countries, one of the very few outside influences on cooking in the region.
Yet, regardless of its legitimacy, Alifom’s lasagna did not set firmly, nor was it particularly pleasing to the eye. “It was delicious, but was it something that was usable and sellable?” says Alifom, who has a food and beverage background with Marriott Hotels. “When you started digging into it, the thing was moving left and right.”
You might wonder why anyone would feel the need to refine one of the world’s most singular cuisines, a spicy and essentially sweet-free set of dishes that are consumed with your hands, the tactile experience as important as the gustatory one.
Chefs and owners have their motivations: They might be threatened by creeping gentrification. They may feel the need to raise the price of what some consider “cheap” immigrant food to cover
It was delicious, but was it something that was usable and sellable?..When you started digging into it, the thing was moving left and right. Sileshi Alifom, Das Ethiopian Cuisine’s owner
expenses. Or they may just want to see the food evolve, as part of the creative process that pushes all cuisines forward, whether Spanish, Chinese or Japanese.
Whatever the reason, anyone who wishes to adapt Ethiopian food for a modern diner must confront the same problem Alifom did: Dishes such as redlentil wat and split-yellow-pea alicha are loose and stewy, their wet ingredients hard to corral or, worse, potentially corrosive to inventions such as Ethiopian lasagna with injera.
Alifom learned fast that to incorporate the flavours of Ethiopia into upscale preparations, he would need more culinary skill than he possessed. He would need a chef, someone trained to see a stew not just as a stew but as a combination of components that could be transformed into something altogether new.
Historically, such a person has been hard to find in - or even introduce to - the Ethiopian immigrant community in the United States.
Most Ethiopian chefs in America learned their skills at home, passed down from one generation to another, and many of these chefs do not willingly share their secrets with strangers, other chefs or their own family members.
“Mum doesn’t share the recipes. Like, the kids don’t really know them. One knows, kind of,” says Christopher Roberson, the newly installed chef at Etete on the edge of therapidly gentrifying Shaw neighbourhood in Washington.
The “Mom” in this case is Tiwaltengus “Etete” Shenegelgn, the namesake behind Etete, which means “mama” in Amharic.
She is the mother of Yared and Henok Tesfaye, brothers who co-founded U Street Parking and channeled their profits into a restaurant to showcase their mum’s cooking.
Stylish in decor but still traditional in cuisine, Etete debuted in 2004 in the 1900 block of Ninth Street NW, a strip that once sought official city recognition as “Little Ethiopia.”
The block was actually not the first District of Columbia neighbourhood to entice Ethiopians, who began fleeing their country in the mid-1970s, following the overthrow of emperor Haile Selassie and the installation of a military government.
The refugees first landed in Adams Morgan, which soon became the nerve center of Ethiopian food and culture in Washington, a city that had long attracted the East Africans with its mix of political power and educational opportunities.
But like Adams Morgan before it, the Ninth Street strip eventually grew too expensive for the mum-and-pop restaurants and businesses that had helped make it a destination. — WPBloomberg