Stop and Smell the Ethiopian Coffee

If you look around when traffic’s stopped (as it often is), you know you aren’t in Beverly Hills. Thrift shops and second-hand furniture stores display their goods on the sidewalk. A pawn shop advertises that it buys used blue jeans.

But this is an important commercial district, as you can tell by the mid-block traffic light for pedestrians. At one time it was a Jewish neighborhood. Then it was known for Asian food--L.A.’s first Vietnamese restaurant and a number of Chinese places. In the last 10 years, it has become the commercial center of the Southland’s estimated 30,000 Ethiopians. There are two Ethiopian stores here and half a dozen restaurants.

Among the 70 ethnic groups in Ethiopia, the dominant one has long been the Amharas, a Christian people of the highlands. Wherever there are Ethiopians, you see the angular squiggles of the Amharic alphabet. (The people of Harer, Ethiopia’s coffee capital, who use the Arabic alphabet, think Amharic letters look like the markings on a butterfly’s wing. In their language, a butterfly is an amharakitab, “Amharic book.”) Most of the Southland’s Ethiopians are Amharas.

When Ethiopians started coming to California in the late ‘70s, partly as the result of political conflicts back home, they began opening restaurants that served their rich, spicy cuisine. In 1988, a restaurant which had actually begun life as a West African restaurant but ended up with a half-Ethiopian menu moved to this block of Fairfax. The next Ethiopian restaurant moved here from La Brea Avenue three years later, and the neighborhood was on its way to a new ethnic identity.

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1. Not everything of food interest on the block is Ethiopian. Westside Pharmacy, at 1015 S. Fairfax, which caters to the convalescent home across the street, sells a large selection of Chinese dishware, electric rice steamers and individual electric burners along with medicines and health foods.

2. Almost immediately south at 1025 S. Fairfax is Sizzling Seasons Continental Ethiopian Cafe. But forget the name and the sign saying that it delivers. It’s basically an espresso bar with an Ethiopian clientele.

3. Ethiopian Messob Restaurant, which has been here since 1991, has a warm, social feeling. Photos of people partying with proprietress Rahel Woldmedhin fill the walls all around the room, along with others of Ethiopian musicians and athletes. Above the bar a sign reads “Hello” in Amharic (t’ena yist’illin~) with a cheery drawing of a hand doffing a hat.

In the front window, a room has been set up in traditional Ethiopian style complete with a thatched roof. The table turns out to be a huge drum covered with goat skin--and supported by actual goat’s feet, nailed right onto the body of the drum. It’s the ideal place to enjoy the Ethiopian coffee ceremony. In the rest of the restaurant, you eat on ordinary restaurant tables, so if you should want the gojo room, be sure to make a reservation.

Messob serves the usual Ethiopian menu with a couple of less familiar dishes, such as dulet (a tripe stew) and bozena shiro (meat with a sort of chickpea polenta). A banner outside proclaims a specialty in fish dishes.

The restaurant occasionally has live music and also does a lot of catering. The bar offers a small selection of Ethiopian goods for sale: spices, incense, coffee beans, tea, postcards. The bar also sells an imported Ethiopian beer, Orit (the name means “old time”).

Ethiopian Messob Restaurant (Messob Worq Injera), 1041 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 938-8827. Open 11 a.m.-11 p.m. daily.

4. Right next door is Marathon Restaurant and Cafe. The name might make you expect a Greek restaurant unless you’re aware of the pride Ethiopians take in their long dominance of the marathon event in the Olympics.

This is a plain little cafe-style hangout. In the afternoons, when business is slow, you may hear a clicking sound in the back. It’s a billiards-like game called carambola, one of the legacies of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936-’41) and of neighboring Eritrea (1890-1941).

The menu also shows the Italian influence that sometimes surprises people coming to an Ethiopian restaurant for the first time. Among dishes with names like zilzil tibbs and firfir tibbs, there’s spaghetti with meat sauce. In fact, spaghetti and sandwiches play a larger role on this menu than on most.

Marathon Restaurant and Cafe, 1043 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 938-4243. Open 11 a.m.-2 a.m. daily.

5. Right on the other side of Nile Travel, with its travel poster advertising Ethiopia’s “13 months of sunshine,” is Safari African Boutique. True to its name, the shop sells colorful dresses, jewelry made from silver and shells, jaunty T-shirts and knickknacks from all over Africa, not to mention a lot of music cassettes, but the focus is largely Ethiopian. It makes a specialty of the traditional embroidery of the Dorze people of Ethiopia.

The only foods sold here are k’want’a, a very dry, slightly peppery beef jerky, and dabbo k’olo, sweetish bits of fried dough. These are favorite snacks in Ethiopia. Since they keep indefinitely, travelers carry them and they are issued to Ethiopian soldiers as field rations.

Safari is a good place to shop for Ethiopian food utensils. It sells the tin braziers for roasting coffee and larger ones for cooking food. You can get incense and choose from several kinds of incense burners.

For storing food, Ethiopians use baskets covered with goat skin. A particularly capacious one (called an agelgel or helper) is the Ethiopian army’s dashing-looking equivalent of a knapsack. Safari also sells smaller containers with a lot of character: gourds, wooden containers for ground coffee and shot glasses carved from bone or horn for brandy (araqi).

Safari African Boutique, 1049 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 937-4327. Open 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday and Saturday; noon-6 p.m. Sunday.

6. Across the street and down toward the end of the block is Nyala Restaurant, a cavernous, softly lit place that features Ethiopian and reggae bands on weekends. It has a sophisticated air and, of all the restaurants on the street, seems the best for meditatively drinking an Ethiopian beer (or the famous Congolese brew Ngok’.)

The menu lists the usual items and several Italian dishes. (The kitfo is lightly cooked unless you demand it raw.) The coffee ceremony is available, complete with the roasting of the beans in a lidded pan.

Nyala Restaurant, 1076 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 936-5918. Open 11 a.m.-midnight Sunday-Thursday; 11 a.m.-2 a.m. Friday-Saturday.

7. Hansen’s Bakery, specializing in custom cakes for weddings, birthdays and other occasions, far antedates the Ethiopian presence on Fairfax (see accompanying story).

It is also by far the busiest operation on the street. The office has no fewer than four desks where you can talk with a cake consultant, and there’s also a couch and coffee table for leafing through huge books of cake photos. Examples of cake wizardry are on display on counters and in display cases. One elaborate cake depicts a quincean~era party complete with figures of the young woman’s girlfriends and their male escorts.

Upstairs is a showroom of wedding cake designs, ranging from nice-looking ones under $200 to spectacular ones in the $300 range (one designed in Ethiopian style) up to a couple just under $700 that really make the eyes goggle. A display case shows choices of keepsake ornaments for the cake top.

Hansen’s Bakery, 1072 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 936-5527, 936-4332; fax: 934-3018. Open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; 8 a.m.-noon Sunday.

8. Blue Nile, at 1068 S. Fairfax, is one of the older restaurants on the street. It recently changed hands but is not open for business yet, although there’s a sign announcing that the hours will be 6-10 p.m. Friday through Saturday.

9. Just inside the door of Rosalind’s Ethiopian Food is a small area separated from the dining room by windows, making it a place for semi-sidewalk dining. The large dining room is dominated by a huge bar. A door leads to another dining room with a stage for musicians.

The menu still lists Liberian collards, Sierra Leone beef and Ghanaian eggplant on the menu from Rosalind’s earlier incarnation as a West African restaurant. The center of gravity, however, is clearly Ethiopian. The house specialty is beef t’ibs served on a clay brazier (more or less an Ethiopian sizzling platter) with a dark red chile paste (awaze) on the side.

At various times, Rosalind’s owner, Fekere Gebre-Mariam, has also owned several other businesses in the neighborhood, including the Blue Nile and Merkato.

Rosalind’s Ethiopian Food, 1044 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 936-2486. Open 11 a.m.-midnight daily.

10. Merkato is full of Ethiopian stuff, from the wall clock with Ethiopian numerals to the rue plant growing by the front door. It aims to be an Ethiopian one-stop: a restaurant, spice importer, gift shop (fashions, crafts, books, magazines and music cassettes)--and cappuccino bar. Among the books, “Exotic Ethiopian Cooking,” by Daniel Joel Mesfin (Ethiopian Cookbook Enterprise, 1987), is virtually the only Ethiopian cookbook available in English. Merkato is also the place to buy injera bread (see Kitchen Tip, H6) and ambasha, a 2-pound loaf dotted with raisins and black cumin.

About 20 spices are displayed on the shelves toward the back of the store. Most are available at any Indian import store, if not at your local supermarket, but you might have trouble finding sacred basil, bishop’s weed, rue berries and long pepper anywhere else. Be sure to ask a clerk what’s in any given package because the rather haphazard labels can be misleading.

Among the spices are staples like barley flour and the tiny Ethiopian grain tef (5 pounds/$7), which looks rather like ground pepper. Along with flax seed (“flexed seed,” the label is likely to say) and two kinds of lentils, there are the small brown Ethiopian chickpeas from which chickpea flour (shiro) is made. You may see a few bags of injera chips, which are like tortilla chips made from injera bread.

On a shelf nearer the door is an American-made brand of t’ej, the honey wine that is Ethiopia’s national beverage. You can also buy a hops-like herb called gesho here if you want to make your own t’ej and little jugs called berilles for serving it. Surprisingly, Merkato carries five imported Ethiopian grape wines too.

Sidamo and Harrar coffees, roasted and green, are available, along with jabana pots and braziers and other equipment for roasting coffee beans. The incense selection includes Indian incense sticks along with the traditional Ethiopian frankincense and myrrh.

The adjoining restaurant serves the usual dishes and a few unusual ones, such as ye-k’want’a firfir (injera with stewed jerky) and tere siga (yet another raw beef dish: cubes mixed with red pepper). The dining room is decorated in the usual reds, yellows and greens of Ethiopian restaurants, with the peculiar note of a dozen or so umbrellas hung upside down from the ceiling.

Merkato Restaurant/Market/Gift Shop, 1036 1/2 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 935-1175; fax 935-1796. Open 11 a.m.-11 p.m. daily.

11. If you have no taste for Ethiopian food, there’s still a reason to visit this block: Chris Michaels Cafe, a hip little Westside-style cafe complete with exposed brick wall and tasteful jazz soundtrack. The place doesn’t have a wine license, but Michaels, who also runs a catering business out of this kitchen, serves sophisticated things like warm pear and goat cheese salad, seared scallops on field greens and farfalle with sundried tomatoes, roasted garlic and peas. In the Westside manner, half the entrees are pastas--but not one of them is spaghetti.

Chris Michaels Cafe, 1036 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 930-9191. Open 7:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Monday-Friday, 6:30-10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

LENTIL SALAD (Ye-Missir Wat) (VEGETARIAN)

This is one of the vegetarian dishes created for the many fast days of the Ethiopian Christians.

1 cup dried lentils

Water

Salt

2 tablespoons oil

4 tablespoons lime or lemon juice

1 cup chopped onions or shallots

2 teaspoons minced ginger root

2 teaspoons minced serrano chiles

Rinse lentils under running water and remove any foreign objects. Place lentils in saucepan with water to cover by 2 inches, add 1 teaspoon salt and bring to boil. Skim off scum that comes to surface and reduce heat to low. Cook until lentils are tender but still firm, 35 to 40 minutes. Drain in sieve and rinse with cold water to stop cooking.

Combine oil, lime juice, 1/2 teaspoon salt, onions, ginger and chiles in bowl. Add lentils and mix. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate 1 hour before serving.

4 to 5 servings. Each of 4 servings:

243 calories; 449 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 8 grams fat; 32 grams carbohydrates; 14 grams protein; 2.87 grams fiber.

SPICY BEEF TARTARE (Kitfo) (UNDER 30 MINUTES)

This rich raw beef paste makes a memorable appetizer, aromatic and just a little hot. In Ethiopia, clarified butter would be used, but it is not necessary in our climate. In cold weather, you may have to warm the meat slightly in the skillet for it to mix properly with the butter. Kitfo may also be lightly fried, in which case it is known as lebleb.

1 pound boneless chuck steak, thoroughly trimmed of fat and gristle and ground at home, or 1 pound extra-lean ground beef

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon lime or lemon juice

1/4 pound (1 stick) butter (clarified, if desired)

1 large clove garlic, minced

2 1/2 teaspoons cayenne

1 teaspoon cardamom

1/4 teaspoon ginger

1/2 teaspoon pepper

Remove meat from refrigerator 1 hour in advance and allow to come to room temperature.

Dissolve salt in lime juice.

Melt butter in skillet over low heat and fry garlic, cayenne, cardamom, ginger and pepper 2 to 3 minutes. Mix thoroughly into meat along with salted lime juice. Serve immediately with injera bread or crackers.

10 to 12 appetizer servings. Each of 12 servings:

110 calories; 198 mg sodium; 39 mg cholesterol; 10 grams fat; 1 gram carbohydrates; 6 grams protein; 0.12 gram fiber.