Restaurant Review : Traditional Ethiopian Food and Nouvelle Cuisine at Red Sea in Santa Monica

The Red Sea calls itself “the only seaside Ethiopian restaurant” in Los Angeles. Not only is that an unexpected selling point, it’s not quite the whole story. The Red Sea is also in surprisingly fancy company. It’s in the little courtyard right behind Ivy at the Shore.

You can still find colorful old African traditions in this upper-trendo Santa Monica location. When you order Ethiopian coffee, it’s flavored with spices and comes in a clay pot, on the same tray with some burning frankincense.

The Red Sea also makes excellent injera , that Ethiopian combination of bread and eating utensil. It’s a sort of crepe cooked on only one side, leaving the other full of bubbles. You use a swatch of this stuff sort of like a dish towel (it even looks a little like a dish towel) to pick up your food, which has been ladled on top of some more injera. The Red Sea’s version, unlike some others, has a delicious sourdough flavor.

However, the Red Sea offers plain old rice as an alternative to injera , and this is food for thought. It may be a sign that Ethiopian food is at last adapting to the American market because the Red Sea also seems to be downplaying that most characteristic ingredient of Ethiopian food, the highly spiced butter called nit’r qibe with which a lot of dishes are traditionally flavored. We live in a “butyrophobic” society, and even Ethiopian-Americans may have picked up on our national cholesterol-consciousness.

The best dishes here still have a spicy or buttery flavor. The fish stew, assa wot , has the spiciest sauce (oddly, the menu calls this sweet-and-sour, paprika-laden sauce Cajun), though with less scent of cardamom than you might expect from Ethiopian food. Tibs is a sauceless dish of fried beef, a little like an Indian dry curry, though with a totally different spice aesthetic. Here you can definitely taste the spiced butter.

But kitfo , a dish of raw chopped beef and mild red pepper mixed with spiced butter, has a pensive and uncommunicative air that I suspect is due to nit’r qibe deprivation. When it’s done right, kitfo can be like steak tartare turning into candy, but I suspect that in Santa Monica, a dish composed of red meat and butter may just have the deck stacked against it.

Maybe they’re also sparing the nit’r qibe with the doro wot , but here I suspect simply down-spicing. The “assertively spiced sauce” mentioned on the menu is actually very mild. However, mild doro wot is still OK, and so is a mild lamb stew called zignie , though you do have to have a taste for the wild side of lamb (the menu warns that there may be small bones in it).

You can get assa wot , doro wot and zignie on a combination plate, or, for two or more, a super-combo called messob : all three plus tibs. There are also a couple of a la carte entrees that don’t include the automatic salad and injera : doro wot , zignie , chicken or lamb curry with rice, or a typical Ethiopian dish of stew mixed with injera called firfir. Somewhat surprisingly, you can also get spaghetti, presumably a consequence of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia in the ‘30s.

Appetizers are never the attraction in Ethiopian restaurants. Here, there’s not much except a version of hummus reddened with paprika, and sambusa , a samosa- like turnover filled with meat and lentils. However, the Ethiopian church has a lot of fast days, and Ethiopian cuisine has a lot of vegetarian dishes to go with them.

The best one that the Red Sea serves is yekik alitcha , an excellent puree of split peas with a tart flavor and an enthusiastic starchy aroma of split peas. The yemisir wot is also pretty good, like a very thick lentil soup, lentil soup you could stand a spoon in, if you had a spoon (you can’t get injera to stand up; I’ve tried).

Collards and spinach, although they’re supposed to be flavored with ginger and green chili, are very much like the simplest American version of cooked greens. The vegetable dish yatakilt kikil , which automatically accompanies meat dinners, varies seasonally (it is cabbage and carrots now). A vegetarian could put together a pleasant meal by ordering a combination plate of yatakilt kikil with the split peas and the lentils.

The Red Sea’s version of Ethiopian food is not quite like what you get in any of the other Ethiopian restaurants in town. Maybe they’d do better not to stress their seaside location (it’s actually a pretty fair walk to the water) and advertise as the home of Ethiopian nouvelle cuisine (or, rather, addis watbet ).

Suggested dishes: assa wot (fish), $9.25; tibs (beef), $8.95; yekik alitcha (split pea puree), $4.75.

Red Sea Ethiopian Restaurant, 1551 Ocean Ave., Santa Monica. (213) 394-5198. Open for lunch and dinner daily from 11 a.m. until 10 p.m. Beer and wine. Parking in lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $18 to $38.