Ethiopian cuisine is strong in Washington. Why are some changing a good thing?

DC’s Ethiopian community – the largest in the US – is served by restaurants that are upping their game to stay in line with shifting trends in their neighbourhoods

Cultures meet: Ethiopian-style tacos using ‘injere’ flatbread in the Etete restaurant in Washington DC (Washington Post)

Two summers ago Sileshi Alifom tried to create an East African lasagna. It was part of his ongoing campaign to refine the food at the white-tablecloth Das Ethio­pian Cuisine in Washington DC. Semi-frozen sections of injera, the fermented Ethio­pian flatbread, served as his noodles – Alifom layered them with a yellow split-pea puree, collard greens, red-lentil stew and a mild cheese, all flavours from his childhood.

While un­or­tho­dox, the Ethio­pian lasagne is rooted in East African cooking. Neighbouring Eritrea was an Italian colony for decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Under Benito Mussolini Italy occupied Ethi­o­pia from 1936 to 1941. Its food and drink left a permanent mark on both Ethiopia and Eritrea, one of the very few outside influences on cooking in the region.

Yet regardless of its legitimacy, Alifom’s lasagne did not set firmly, nor was it particularly pleasing to the eye. “It was delicious – but was it something that was useable and sellable?” He knows the answer, of course – he used to work for the Marriott chain. “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 restaurateurs 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 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: dishes such as red-lentil 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 lasagne with injera. Alifom learned fast that to incorporate the flavours of Ethi­o­pia into upscale preparations, he would need more culinary skill than he possessed. A chef, in fact, 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 US. 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.

Mama said knock you out: Etete’s Tiwaltengus Shenegelgn with chef Christopher Roberson (Washington Post)

“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 the rapidly gentrifying Shaw neighbourhood in Washington.

The mum 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 a parking business and channelled their profits into a restaurant to showcase their mother’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 part of DC 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 arrived in the Adams Morgan district, which soon became the nerve centre 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 family restaurants and businesses that had helped make it a destination. So the Ethio­pian community shifted its base again, settling in suburbs such as Silver Spring, where expats continued to do what they’ve always done: cater to their own kind, in a region that can accommodate such radical movements. The Washington area, after all, has the highest concentration of Ethio­pian immigrants in America.

This pattern of rebuilding a community in a new location has meant that Ethio­pian restaurants have rarely been forced to adapt to new diners and new palates. The restaurants “largely serve the Ethio­pian community,” says Harry Kloman, a journalism instructor at the University of Pittsburgh, who has been researching and reporting on Ethio­pian eateries since the early 2000s. “You go into most Ethio­pian restaurants in DC, you will find that most of the clientele is Ethio­pian.”

Besides, as celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson says, his fellow Ethiopians are not always open to change, perhaps a carryover from the African country which has remained largely independent throughout its history.

“We’re very traditional as people, Ethiopians,” says Samuelsson, the chef behind Red Rooster in Harlem and Marcus at MGM National Harbour. “If you look at most other African countries, they’ve been colonised. So they were much more open to other things. We’re not.”

The Tesfaye brothers were ­determined to remain a presence on Ninth Street, even if it meant blowing up everything about their original Etete, including the prices, which now cross the $20 (£16) threshold for larger plates. They have essentially conformed to a neighbourhood where one-bedroom apartments can cost £2,400 a month and where the retail options run the gamut from an art-house movie theatre to a specialist grocery shop.

The siblings found inspiration in the work of restaurateurs such as Ashok Bajaj, the New Delhi native who had pioneered upscale Indian cooking in Washington with the four-star Rasika in Penn Quarter. “We’re catching up with the neighborhood,” Yared Tesfaye says weeks before the remodelled Etete reopens – it’s mid-March. “We’re trying to make it the Rasika of Ethiopian restaurants.”

The new Etete does not just mimic restaurants where traditional Ethio­pian dishes are presented in more refined settings, sometimes served on elegant plateware rather than gebeta trays covered with injera. Nor does the new Etete follow the lead of counter-service operations such as the Ethio Express Grill in DC, where you can cobble together a fast-casual meal that only passingly resembles Ethiopian cooking. Or the stylish but traditionally minded Letena where you can substitute rice or pitta bread for injera.

No, the Tesfaye brothers wanted a more comprehensive overhaul. They wanted a restaurant that pushed Ethio­pian food into previously unexplored areas, seeking not only refinement but also, perhaps, a fusion with other cuisine. But the siblings, like Alifom at Das, knew they were out of their element. They and their mother couldn’t create such a restaurant by themselves. They would need help, and not just the help of longtime friend Nancy Koide, co-owner of the modern Asian restaurant SEI, who updated the interiors and operations at Etete.

What Yared and Henok Tesfaye really needed was a chef. Enter Etete’s Roberson. The 30-year-old African-American chef is not formally trained but he has studied under some of the finest chefs in Washington.

Roberson was not naive about the difficulties of his assignment. He was familiar with Ethio­pian cuisine, both as a diner and as a cook who occasionally prepared the food at home. But he doesn’t speak Amharic, which presented problems in collaborating with Shenegelgn, who has not mastered the English language. But perhaps most problematic, Roberson didn’t grow up with the taste of Ethio­pian food on his tongue. He would have to train himself to know when the flavours were right, no small task.

Shenegelgn proved to be a tough but patient teacher, especially in instructing Roberson on the art of cooking Ethio­pian vegetables.

“She was like, ‘You have to do the lentils this way, and you have to know how to make it,’” says Roberson. “We’re going to make these things four times, five times. I want you to make it, and I want to taste it. I want you to keep making it until it tastes right’.”

Yet the chef was not limited to the flavours or techniques of Ethi­o­pian cooking when composing dishes. The owners gave Roberson carte blanche to draw inspiration from his own culinary background.

As a result the opening menu at the revamped Etete reads unlike anything you’ve seen before in an Ethio­pian restaurant. Roberson has created an injera taco, stuffed with doro wat, the signature chicken stew of Ethiopia. He’s rejigged the raw beef dish, kitfo, into a steak tartare preparation with injera crisps. He’s even added black-eyed-pea fritters to the menu, for a taste of West Africa. Traditionalists need not worry: There are also a couple of large-format offerings served on a platter with injera.

Most of Roberson’s dishes are small plates, borrowing the format common to countless restaurants in the District’s contemporary, tapas-centric dining scene. Such plates may be foreign to Ethio­pian restaurants, but they preserve, in their own limited way, an important element in Ethio­pian dining: the communal feast.

Roberson’s dishes, in fact, are not far removed from what other chefs have created in their limited experiments with Ethio­pian flavors. When Samuelsson opened Marcus at MGM National Harbor late last year, he had a pot pie on the menu. It was filled with doro wat, chopped liver and egg. At Merkato 55, his short-lived ad­ven­ture in Pan-African cooking in New York’s Meatpacking District in the late 2000s, Samuelsson served a rack of lamb rubbed with berbere, the nuclear Ethio­pian spice blend. Likewise, on his menu at Cockscomb in San Francisco, chef Chris Cosentino offers berbere-spiced carrots with charred dates and labneh.

“You got to do it with a wink,” says Samuelsson. “My aim is to make something delicious, not to be authentic. We’re not in Ethiopia, you know what I mean?”

Whom, you may ask, is this upscale Ethio­pian food designed to feed? American diners who want to try Ethio­pian cuisine but don’t want to eat with their hands? Second- or third-generation Ethiopian Americans who are not invested in authenticity?

Kloman, the journalism instructor and Ethio­pian dining expert, thinks such fare may alienate the very people who used to frequent places like Etete. “I think most everyday Ethiopians would not be the least bit interested in something like this,” he says.

But then Kloman pauses and thinks about a strange phenomenon in Ethio­pian restaurants: Americans are the ones who usually order the beers imported from Ethi­o­pia, not the expats. Ethio­pian immigrants apparently prefer Guinness or Heineken, which they view as status symbols.

So, Kloman reflects, maybe some immigrants would take to fancy Ethio­pian food after all. “As a pretence,” he says, “they might be interested.”

© The Washington Post