Habesha amply satisfies longing for Ethiopian food
The Curious Kererū, our restaurant critic, is spreading its wings across Christchurch to uncover the best dining experiences the city has to offer. This week the Kererū reviews Habesha.
As the Curious Kererū, I’m here to celebrate curiosity. Curiosity leads to exploration, exploration leads to discovery, and discovery leads to deliciousness. But there is a flip side – and that is when, having discovered deliciousness, you can’t access it. Frustrated desire is longing, and for many years I’ve been longing to find Ethiopian food in Christchurch.
So when Carly Gooch reported in The Press in December that an Ethiopian cafe had opened in Addington, I was delighted.
As Carly reported, Habesha, which was formerly Pulse Cafe, is “hidden in the industrial back streets of Addington, Christchurch, serving Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine and coffee”. Habesha is a pan-ethnic term that includes the various ethnic groups of Ethiopia, Eritrea (which gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993) and the Ethiopian-Eritrean diaspora.
Habesha’s owner, Yosief Kahsai, is part of that diaspora, and greeted us warmly when we wandered in looking for lunch. At first glance, Habesha appears to have a bit of an identity crisis. Is it a cafe serving the local industrial area’s workers, a coffee fan’s source of a unique brew, an Ethiopian restaurant or a cultural outpost? Yes to all of the above. But mostly, it feels like one man’s personal effort to bring his Ethiopian food and coffee to a new audience.
You can get sandwiches, burgers, loaded fries, souvlaki and even bagels at Habesha, but we were there for a fix of injera, the spongy, slightly sour fermented pancakelike flatbread that is the staple of Ethiopian food.
Three main dishes on the menu were served with injera, and so, of course, we ordered all three. After an encouraging wait (meaning real work was going on in the kitchen), we were served a beautiful large platter of injera with zigni, tibsi and shiro.
Zigni, which the menu calls a national dish of Ethiopia and Eritrea, is a tomatobased beef stew flavoured with berbere, the cornerstone spice blend of Ethiopian cooking. It can be made with goat or lamb, and you might want to check with Yosief which protein is on the menu on the day.
Berbere is based on dried chillies, and you will feel the heat tingling on your tongue, but it was not fiery compared with some versions I’ve had. But berbere has so much more than just chilli heat. It can include holy basil, cumin, fenugreek, coriander, cloves, peppercorns, paprika, turmeric, ginger, nutmeg and cayenne.
What I most love about Ethiopian food is the way the complex spices blend so well with the juices of the other ingredients, and then that all soaks into the injera.
I also love that injera is made to be eaten with your hand. I know that weirds out some people, and we can all agree that the fork is a great invention, but I don’t think it does justice to Ethiopian food.
When you use your hand to hold injera to scoop up some stew or a lentil dish, you can feel both the warmth of the food and the various textures. It gives you another form of sensory input before the bite even reaches your mouth, making for heightened anticipation. I’m a fan, and if you choose to eat that way, it is customary to wash your hands before eating. But if you’d rather not use your hand, there are forks on the table.
The second meat dish was tibsi, a simple stir fry of cubed beef flavoured with garlic and a strong acidic kick that, I think, was lemon juice. It can also be ordered as tibsi awaze or mitmita. Yosief gave us some awaze to try, a type of berbere paste with the tang of an Indian chutney.
The remaining dishes on the platter were shiro, which is four different vegetable dishes: a nutty green lentil stew, a chickpeabased stew, some sauteed cabbage, and a red lentil puree. They were all delicious, and I imagine vegetarians would be thrilled by their variety and tastiness.
Shiro is often made with clarified butter, which would make it non-vegan, but check with Yosief, because I saw some references online to Habesha’s shiro being vegan.
Our coffee also took a bit of a wait but was worth it. We could hear interesting brewing sounds, and then Yosief appeared with an earthenware flask called a jebena. The coffee is both brewed in and served from the jebena, which is usually a family heirloom.
This had the traditional horsehair in the tip of the spout, which acts as a filter for the coffee grounds. Ethiopia is one of the world’s great coffee producers, and the brew was strong but not bitter as we drank it from traditional small cups.
As usual, we were full (the trusty sidekick to foodie curiosity), so perhaps it was just as well that Yosief was out of himbasha – a sweetish, circular, celebratory flatbread.
We’ll be back to try it, alongside our next fixofinjeraandberbere.
The Commerce Commission’s deep dive into the banking industry provides useful information for anyone wanting to get the best deal from their bank.
The insights are scattered throughout the draft market study that it published on Thursday and which it hopes may help usher in a new era of stronger competition.
Unsurprisingly, the commission found that it pays to be an “engaged customer”, but if you thought getting the sharpest deal on offer would be easy, think again.
The ‘discounts’ banks will offer
The commission revealed that banks offer “discretionary discounts” to about 50% to 60% of their mortgage customers.
The discounts on offer from ANZ, ASB, BNZ, Westpac and Kiwibank can change frequently, as they are set by pricing committees that in some cases meet each week, as well as in response to major events, such as changes in the official cash rate, it said.
But it reported that home owners who negotiated a discount on their mortgage could commonly secure a 10- to 20-basis point reduction on their interest rate.
For context, a customer could expect to save about $10,000 from a 10bp rate discount on a $500,000 loan repaid over 25 years.
Discounts were rarely more than 50 basis points, the Commerce Commission found. But senior bank staff commonly had more discretion to offer larger discounts than more junior employees, it reported, suggesting customers may need to speak to more than one bank employee to be confident they are getting the best deal.
The commission found that discounts were not only offered to borrowers.
“Engaged consumers appear to be able to get better term deposit rates by comparing and negotiating with providers,” it also found.
In some cases, frontline bank staff had the discretion to immediately offer better deposit rates, within set limits, it said.
What if you switch banks?
If negotiating with your existing bank doesn’t result in a deal you are happy with, there is always the option of switching banks.
The commission found that 62% of bank customers it surveyed who had switched banks over the past three years found this to be an easy process.
But an alarming 8% reported that it had been difficult, with 21% indicating their experience was somewhere in between.
One hassle to be aware of is the need to manually update payment card details in any services where an old bank card has been on file. That could include “apps, websites, charities and shopping services”, the commission noted.
It observed that as of August, half of new home loan customers were splitting their home loans into separate tranches with different fixed terms. But it pointed out that this could make it harder for those customers to transfer their loans to another bank without incurring fees, in effect complicating their ability to shop around.
That could be a reason for avoiding split loans.
Payments NZ operates a switching services that can help customers migrate some of their payment arrangements. But the commission cautioned that this only provided “limited support” to consumers switching their main transaction account.
Who to switch to?
It would be handy if the commission’s market study suggested that one bank consistently offered the best deals but, sadly, no.
It found that when it came to floating-rate mortgages, Kiwibank and ANZ most often had the lowest headline rates, while ASB’s rates tended to be in the middle of the pack, and BNZ’s and Westpac’s rates higher.
When it came to more popular one-year fixed-term loans, the rankings were more evenly distributed, though it said Kiwibank most often had the lowest headline rate.
BNZ appeared to be most focused on offering the best two-year fixed-term loans, it said.
Discretionary discounts and other incentives offered by banks, such as “cashbacks”, complicate the equation further.
The bottom line is the commission found “the lack of consistency in relative prices and the sporadic nature of competition” meant customers couldn’t have confidence that any particular bank would best serve their home lending needs into the future.
Even trying to get the best deal on offer at any particular moment in time appears fraught with difficulty.
The commission warned that discretionary discounts and incentives such as cashbacks meant customers could only be certain of the details of any offer – including the interest rate – after going through “a full application process” with each bank.
Regulation might be needed to force banks to present their offers in a way that made it easy for consumers to compare offers across different providers, it said.
A word of caution on mortgage brokers
Given this, it seems unsurprising that many people to turn to mortgage brokers to help them pick their loan provider.
But the commission made it clear that it had concerns that their advice could be influenced by a complicated range of incentives banks offered brokers for putting customers their way.
Depending on the bank, those incentives could include a flat fee or commission of between 0.5% and 1% on the value of each loan, and a “trail” commission totalling 0.15% or 0.2% of the value of the loan while it was still active.
The upfront fees paid to brokers could in some cases be subject to a “clawback” by the bank if the borrower later jumped ship, making it less attractive for them to later make a switch.