Wot’s Up

New on South Fairfax’s African restaurant row, Nyala is a dark, cavernous Ethiopian hang that’s groovier than you can imagine, with ochre-stippled walls and African-shield screens, brimming glasses of honey wine, silhouettes of antelopes, and lighting that manages to highlight the cheekbones of everybody in the room.

When you walk in, a sweet Al Wilson soul ballad might be blasting over the big speakers, four sharp-dressed men clustered around the turntables arguing whether next to play Lakeside or Cameo. Or perhaps you have arrived in the midst of Abyssinian Oldies Night, to a swirl of Motown and Isaac Hayes. Sometimes they even play traditional Ethiopian music--modal, dark appealing stuff that sounds just a little like Led Zeppelin played backwards.

No matter what, it seems, a Laker game flickers soundlessly on a large-screen TV over the bar; no matter what time you show up, you will probably leave before nine-tenths of the people in the room, who tend to treat Nyala as a clubhouse. There are a lot of other Ethiopian restaurants in this neighborhood now--at least one of them, Keste Demena, even has slightly better food--but Nyala is the place to go on a hot third date, someplace elegant yet exotic. It’s sort of sensual, eating with your fingers.

The central fact of Ethiopian cuisine: the injera , a pale, moist platter-size pancake with which you scoop up your food. Injera serves the same purpose as the tortilla in Mexican cooking or the pita in Middle Eastern food, but somehow more so--it acts as plate, utensil, condiment and bread, also as an ingredient in about half the stews.

Ethiopian cooking is unthinkable without injera ‘s profound sourness, or without the central flavorings of onions, ginger, red pepper and, especially, lakes of spiced butter, perfumed with cardomom, cumin, holy basil and fenugreek. Before the Italians invaded the country in 1935, Ethiopians flavored even their coffee with salt and the fragrant spiced butter. Ethiopian cooking is anything but light.

If you went to Ethiopian restaurants in the mid-’80s, back when at least one local restaurant critic was speculating whether the cuisine would overtake Thai food as Angelenos’ favorite ethnic cuisine, you know the routine. A waitress brings to the table a round tray, the size of a truck tire, that is lined with injera , then mounds on the food--all stews, almost all brick-red--in front of each person. Then you tear off a piece of injera and eat.

There is a fine version of the chicken stew, doro wot , thick with hot spice and glistening with butter, that includes only one chicken leg and one stewed egg per order but whose sauce will flavor a stack of injera ; there is spicy stewed lamb, yebeg wot , and the tough, tasty beef stew yeawaze tibs . Minchetabish tastes like a fiery Ethiopian take on Texas chili. There’s a good vegetarian red-lentil “chili” here too, yemiser wot.

Kitfo , steak tartare, is more or less the Ethiopian national dish, raw strips of hand-chopped lean beef tossed with warm spiced butter and herbs, and can be transcendentally delicious, greasy and wonderful, wrapped in injera with a few crumbles of Nyala’s house-made Ethiopian cheese and a bit of the mustard-green stew yeabesha gommen .

As is customary at Ethiopian restaurants, hearty Italian dishes occupy half the menu--such things as angel hair pasta with sauteed vegetables and an overwhelming amount of garlic, and spaghetti with an exotically spiced Bolognese sauce. If you’re not Ethiopian yourself, you’ll probably never get around to ordering them. You’ll have to use a fork.

Nyala

1076 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 936-5918. Open Sunday through Thursday 11 a.m. to midnight; Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. Full bar. Live music (call for schedule). MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $17-$24.