Ethiopian Keste Demena: It’s an Adventure in Spiciness

Eating Ethiopian style is a great ice breaker. Who can remain aloof while reaching into a communal platter and picking up food with your fingers? Pulling meat off the bones and dealing with soft, moist vegetable and lentil dishes in this fashion may be messy, but it’s fun.

What alleviates the mess is injera , a thin, spongy, fermented bread that is as soft as a handkerchief. Platters of food are lined with injera and more is served on the side. The technique is to tear off pieces and use them as scoops for the food. Made with wheat flour and with flour ground from a grain called teff , injera has a faint sour flavor.

At Keste Demena (the name means rainbow ), the Ethiopian food is fine and spicy. But more than anything, I’m intrigued by the way this Venice Boulevard restaurant serves coffee. The beans are roasted to order, and the rich, dark brew comes in a handleless earthen pot set on a brightly colored straw ring. You drink from tiny cups, like those used for Chinese tea. And while sipping, you inhale the sweet, strong perfume of incense. (Tiny incense pellets sit atop coals in a tall, golden container that is placed on the table alongside the coffee implements.) It’s an enchanting ritual.

But if sipping coffee here is a soothing experience, eating here can be a spicy adventure. Even the salad dressing tastes hot. At one meal, there were three of us, and we ordered only two dishes. That was plenty because salad, spiced red lentils and lots of injera were included in the dinner. One dish was doro wot , chicken with onion and hot pepper, simmered with spiced butter. Those are mild terms for a very aggressively seasoned bird. The other was yessiga tibbs , a sort of Ethiopian pepper beef.

Recurring themes here are raw meat and the taste of butter. Kitfo , a dish of beef top-round cut into tiny cubes, combines both. Those who object to the raw kitfo that Ethiopians prefer can have it cooked. My group tried both ways and loved the taste of the raw meat inundated with butter and spices. The butter, by the way, is made by boiling unsalted domestic butter and adding imported Ethiopian butter and spices.

Those alarmed by the liberal use of this ingredient in the meats can try Keste Demena’s “no-cholesterol plate.” This is put together from a list of vegetarian dishes, some of which are mustard greens; a combination of green beans, potato, cabbage and carrots; red lentils and a fine lentil salad that is crunchy with shallots and raw chiles.

The meats served here are chicken, beef and lamb--no pork. Fish is available during Lent, although it is not on the menu. Yebeg wot is the well-seasoned and really great tasting lamb. Another lamb dish, yebeg alicha , contains fresh ginger, garlic, turmeric and spiced butter, but the sauce is mild. There is also a chicken version.

Zigni is a zesty beef stew, and minchetabish is wonderfully seasoned beef that is ground as fine as coarse sand. I’d love to put some of it in a taco. I didn’t do so well with tere sega , a bowlful of thick blocks of raw beef that was . . . well, too much rawness for me. But I did like the dipping sauce, a thin, red mixture called awaze .

The restaurant serves Ethiopian breakfast until noon. And the menu includes a few pasta dishes, a reminder of the years when the country was occupied by Italy. The beverages are non-alcoholic except for a mild, home-fermented honey wine called tej . It’s as yellow as fruit juice and has a nice dry tang.

Keste Demena Ethiopian Restaurant, 5779 W. Venice Blvd., Los Angeles. (213) 933-6522. Open Thursday through Tuesday, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Major credit cards accepted. Reservations advised on weekends. Dinner for two, food only, $14-$30.