#10: Eat Ethiopian Food

My dad and I had a date this past Tuesday to travel to exotic Gainesville, VA to visit Zed’s Ethiopian restaurant. We had been trying to get together for several weeks to do this, but the best Ethiopian places in our area are in Georgetown, and it’s difficult to drive in (especially on a week night) and find parking. Last week Dad emailed me that one of the best places in the city had opened a second location out west and we planned our excursion.

We headed out in a rainstorm and found the restaurant tucked in between a childcare facility and a Tae Kwon Do gym. The building was brand new and absolutely spotless. We walked in and found one other table of diners inside. We took our seat and were greeted by the manager who was so polite. We explained that we had never eaten Ethiopian before and he helped us pick our meal from there.

We started with two different appetizers. The first was dried cottage cheese curds with clarified butter and red pepper. The other was sautéed mushrooms with peppers and onions. Both came with the standard injera bread. Traditionally Ethiopian food is eaten with your hands, using the injera bread to scoop up food. Injera is made with a grain called teff and comes out in flat pancake like sheets. It is gray in color, fairly light and very spongy in consistency. It is also typically served on one platter for all diners, with everyone sharing the servings
Both appetizers were very good, especially the mushrooms. The injera was okay, and easy enough to use as a scoop. Here's what it looks like:

For our entrée the manager had suggested we get a sampler of the traditional meat and vegetable dishes. It came out on one huge platter, pictured below. Starting with the cauliflower at the top we had: cauliflower, split pea kik alicha, collard greens gomen, cabbage in sauce tikil gomen, chicken infillay, beef kaey watt, miser watt, more collards, and spicy beef alicha in the middle. And lots more injera. We dove into the meat dishes first and the chicken was delicious, it reminded me of Indian food. The beef kaey watt didn’t have much taste to it, but it was good if you added some of the red lentils (miser watt) to it. All in all the food was good, but the injera really started to weigh on me about halfway through the meal. I kept looking at it and feeling its odd texture in my hands, I knew it resembled something non-edible but I couldn’t think of what. Halfway through the meal it came to me, carpet padding. Injera bread is like that layer of foamy carpet padding they put under the carpeting during installation. After I realized that, the meal started to go downhill. Mentally I couldn’t get that thought out of my head and it was really starting to bother me, but there was no other way to get the food to your mouth without using the injera. I continued on and we finished most of the food, but I was glad when it was over.

We ordered a non-Ethiopian dessert of coffee ice cream and it helped immensely, but on the drive home I could still feel that strange spongy layer in the back of my throat. I can say conclusively at this point that while it wasn’t bad, I don’t need to eat Ethiopian food (specifically injera) ever again.

19 down; 11 to go