Red Sea Food

The only Eritrean restaurant in the Southland stands near a corner of Culver City, not far from where the domed church collapsed during the earthquake a couple of months ago and right on the best eastbound detour to the crumbled patch of the 10. Isola Verde is a curious place, one of those sweet corner restaurants that always seems oddly unpopulated, almost more a drop-in hang for the local expatriates than a full-blown restaurant (although the food is very good), with a liquor-less bar, a pool table and a jumble of Eritrean liberation posters. It is a comfortable enough place to spend a rainy afternoon, reading magazines and drinking strong clove tea.

There is a corner stage for Sunday-night dance bands and neat stacks of flyers in Amharic script and a cool wonders-of-nature photo mural; a string of plastic used-car-lot flags is stapled high on the dining room wall. In the background you hear strange and interesting music, swirling guitars and organs, ululating voices, tricky trance rhythms that appear to have no beginning and no end, and the music sometimes seems like a Philip Glass score heard from the bottom of a swimming pool.

Eritrea is a small country on the southern Red Sea coast, once a colony of Italy--thus the spaghetti and veal cutlet on Isola Verde’s short menu--and recently freed from Ethiopian rule after a long and nasty war of liberation. (Isola Verde’s owners, used to representing their business to new customers as an Ethiopian restaurant, may seem surprised and delighted when you ask about Eritrean dishes.) Isola Verde’s cooking may be remarkably similar to basic Ethiopian food, rich with butter, hot with red pepper, complexly spiced with cardamom, ginger and clove, but it seems lighter somehow, almost a vegetable-intensive, Mediterranean-style version of Ethiopia’s heavy, high-plains cuisine.

As at an Ethiopian restaurant, a meal at Isola Verde revolves around vast sheets of fresh injera bread, soft and faintly springy, strongly sour, pale, with a bubble-pitted surface that looks sort of like what your dad might have told you to look for at the moment you have to turn over a pancake. In “American Fried,” Calvin Trillin described injera as a product that looks as though it has a hundred industrial uses, not including food. This is kind of unfair. The acidic tang of injera is as basic to Ethiopian cooking as the toasty flavor of tortillas is to Mexican cuisine.

Entrees are served family-style, on an injera -lined metal platter the size of a bicycle wheel, and you tear off a piece of another sheet of injera to eat the stews with, sort of wrapping things up taco-style, in lieu of a fork or spoon. At Isola Verde, the selection isn’t large--the meat dishes, for example, consist essentially of a spicy saute of beef and onions called tibs , and the lavishly buttered Ethiopian steak tartare kifto , plus the only intermittently available lamb saute zigni --but they can all be had as fitfit , tossed with still more injera , which can fill you up pretty fast.

But the thing to get here--conceivably among the biggest bargains at any Southland restaurant--is the Eritrean vegetable combination plate (mounds of red-lentil stew, of a sort of Eritrean ratatouille, of spicy spinach, of cabbage and string beans dyed yellow with turmeric), which costs about five dollars and can comfortably feed two.

* Isola Verde

6001 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 202-7425. Open daily, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Street parking. Dinner for two, food only, $10-$13.