Category Archives: Ethiopian

Blue Nile Restaurant

Posted on September 16, 2010 by | 6 Comments

Cuisine: Ethiopian

2361 North High Street (Olde North Columbus / North OSU Campus)
614.421.2323
www.bluenilecolumbus.com

Open
Tuesday – Friday 11:30 am – 3:00 pm; 5:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Saturday 12:00 pm to 3:30 pm; 5:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Sunday 12:00 om to 3:00 pm; 5:00pm – 9:00 pm
Lunch Buffet (Tuesday to Sunday: 8 items and dessert, $8.99)

Click here to map it!

As a city with a giant university in the middle, Columbus has always had some types of alt eateries to offer. However, the tipping point from the usual (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian) to the unexpected can be traced back to 1995. Blue Nile was an Ethiopian Cafe that started on East Main Street by a car wash. Within a year it moved to the campus area to a place where the owner felt he could cater to a larger and broader group of diners. The eatery attracted a lot of press when it opened including a listing as a top ten best new restaurant in Columbus by the Grumpy Gourmet. As part of the story, a cab was sold to get the money needed to open the restaurant.

Blue Nile has survived changes in campus, Columbus and it’s competition to continue on as as a “gateway” alternative eatery. Countless OSU students have entered the world of international eating via the Blue Nile lunch buffet then they have come back for dates and nights out with visiting parents to show off their worldliness to mom and dad.

Some diners can gather around a tray (Mosseb) in a tradtional arragment of chairs and a small wicker tray table

Mequanent and Meaza Berihun are the owners. Both are gracious hosts with Mequanent likely to refer to you as “my friend” on first contact. The husband and wife team have years of experience as guides to first time Ethiopian cuisine eaters. They are happy to provide Ethiopian dining 101 lessons to new customers. It can be a bit intimidating since custom involves eating with your fingers. Injera bread (note: different spellings exist for this food) is a flat, spongy, tangy, crepe-like, flat bread made from teff (previously only available in Ethiopia), wheat and corn flour. Diners pull off strips of the bread to fold into a C with their fingers and then use it to grab and eat their food.

There are two main styles of spicing to the food: spicy – Berbere or mild – Alichas. The typical and best route to take for a first time dinner experience is to gather a few friends and share a platter. The menu offers Specials 1, 2 or 3 for one, two, three or four people. Each special offers a combination of four items from the menu – usually two meat based entrees and two vegetable based entries with varied spicing.

2 different specials for two shared on one tray

Typical items include: Doro Wat – chicken cooked with bebere sauce and served with hard-boiled eggs; Kitfo -minced beef with butter and hot pepper served with seasoned cheese; and Yatakilt Wat – fresh carrots, potatoes, string beans and peppers cooked in tumeric and others spices.

Other items on the menu worth sampling include Ethiopian honey wine and the sambusas (meat or vegetable filled pastries).

If you have a medium sized group with some “wary” eaters, this may be a good first bite into the world of alt eating.

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Solay Bistro

Posted on July 14, 2010 by | 20 Comments

Cuisine: Somali with Ethiopian and other influences

5786 Columbus Square (near intersection of SR 161/East Dublin-Granville Road Cleveland Avenue)
614.899.8800
Open: Monday-Thursday, 11am – 10pm, Friday 11am to 11pm, Saturday 9am to 11pm, Sunday 9am to 9pm
Breakfast from 9am to noon on Saturday and Sunday

Click here to map it!

(Reader warning: There is a long lead in to the meat of the story.)

The aim of alt eats is to make connections. We want to connect you with new cultures, cuisines, areas of the city, and ultimately, the people behind the counter and in the kitchen. The stories of the people that make the food are often as important as the food they create.

Food has a way of bringing people together. Taco Drew met CMH Gourmand at a beer tasting via Columbus Underground. CMH Gourmand met Hungry Woolf at a North Market cooking class. The three of us went on to join Slow Food Columbus. Then we created Taco Trucks Columbus which introduced us to more people and places we would not have met any other way. It seems each person we meet or tweet with or e-mail, adds to the melting pot of alt eats with a restaurant lead, suggestion or feedback. Adding more people to the alt eats team has helped us spice up the content as well.

Food continues to connect us with new people. We met Abdi Roble from the Somali Documentary Project at a Social Media Conference. This prompted us to ask him to share a meal with us to help us better understand and appreciate Somali food and culture. We met with Abdi and his wife Fatima as well as Ismail, another acquaintance from the Somali Documentary Project for a meal. Fatima suggested a last minute change of venue which led us to the newly opened Solay Bistro.

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Posted in African, Ethiopian, Somali

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Lalibela

Posted on March 26, 2010 by | 9 Comments

Cuisine: Ethiopian
1111 South Hamilton Road
614.235.5355

Click here to map it!

You might, at first glance, take Lalibela for a Mexican cantina based on the exterior decor. Upon entering, pool tables and a large bar suggest little more than neighborhood watering hole.  Look (waaay) back to the right, though, and you’ll see a fairly large and ornately decorated dining area.  Beyond that lies a performance stage.

If the above, and the flyers at the entrance promoting DJs and musicians performing there, are any indication, Lalibela is something of a small entertainment hub geared towards our city’s Ethiopian population.

During lunch, though, it’s all about the food.  We settled on hot spicy lamb (lamb sauteed in jalapenos and spices) and quanta firfir (beef ‘jerky’ mixed with strips of injera in a sauce).

Every time we’ve had Ethiopian food, the presentation has never failed to impress.  Lalibela is no exception.  Both of our orders were served on a single large (probably close to 2′ in diameter) plate set within a covered woven basket.  The cover is removed (with a flourish) at the table by the server, and basket of injera strips is provided on the side.

A little bit about injera -it’s unusual stuff, and is an essential part of Ethiopian cuisine. It’s very thin, curious in its spongy texture and appearance, and is made from a flour/water mix that has been left to ferment so it has a sourdough-like tang to it. Injera is used as a ‘plate liner’ for most dishes (to sop up sauces from saucy foods above), in lieu of utensils (use strips of it to pinch food from the plate and bring it to the mouth), and is even occasionally mixed in with the dishes themselves (as with the quanta firfir).

The hot spicy lamb was pleasant enough – the lamb cubes were tasty (though perhaps a bit overdone), and the peppers, sauce, and onions rounded it out nicely.  Don’t take the name too seriously, though.  Our server went to great lengths to verify that we were OK with hot spicy food when we ordered this, but only the most meager hint of heat made it into the dish.

The quanta firfir was difficult to parse.  It seemed to have two different components from two different worlds.  The beef ‘jerky’, while conspicuously cured and dried, wasn’t especially tough (our server told us they cure and dry it in-house).  The flavor was spectacular – beefy, ‘woodsy’, nutty, and mushroom-like were just a few of the words used to describe it.  The injera and sauce, though, were puzzling as they seemed to almost cancel each other out, flavor-wise.

Another oddity was the tanginess of the injera provided on the side – it was far beyond that of any other injera we’ve tried.  Since you get some of it with each bite, this is more important than it might seem.  Perhaps we just got a bad batch?

Lalibela gets good buzz from the people we’ve talked with, and in spite of a few of the hiccups we encountered it’s easy to see why that might be.  At under $10/dish, it’s worth checking out if you’re in the area.

Vegetarians should be happy at Lalibela as there’s a significant meat-free offering.

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Posted in African, Ethiopian