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From roadside shacks to high-end restaurants, you can find it all over Addis Ababa, but Fendika, known for its lively traditional music shows, is a city-wide favourite. Tere siga means raw meat in Amharic – and that’s pretty much all there is to it. More like a mead, its fermented honey is strong in flavour, with a sweet-malty taste. Often a home brew, tej can vary in strength, usually on the potent side.
GRILLED CHICKEN
Translating literally as "a bit of every type," it's a colorful sampling of dishes that can include spiced lentils, potatoes, vegetable stews, and more. It's not only attractive to look at, but offers a variety of flavors and textures that can remind you how much flavor potential vegetables really have. Kitfo is traditionally esteemed for its high nutritional value and seen as a celebration food.
SHIRO
Yes, this means the meat is served virtually raw –- think of it as an Ethiopian analogue to steak tartare. But to play it safe, you can also order kitfo cooked, in which case the meat is heated more thoroughly with the spiced butter mixture). So it's not surprising that many popular Ethiopian dishes feature injera, the country's signature fermented flatbread, as their central ingredient. If you're a fan of fajitas, you'll want to try tibs, another classic of the Ethiopian kitchen. It's basically small slices or chunks of meat (either beef or lamb) quick-fried in butter with onions and garlic, but can take on a range of flavorings, from super-spicy to mild.
ENTHIOPIAN COFFEE
It’s a simple classic, cooked with red onions stir-fry style, accompanied with fresh greens and ever-present injera. Depending on how it’s garnished, it can be a mild or spicy dish. Heat things up with sliced fresh green chilli and plenty of berbere sauce.
UNBELIEVABLY delicious
If your new to Ethiopian food, they are more than happy to make suggestions and give you descriptions, for reference, it's predominantly vegetarian dishes. Everything was tasty and filling, especially for being vegetarian... Oranges and mangoes stacked in pyramids, crates of fresh, fist-sized avocados, bunch after bunch of dangling bananas – it’s hard to miss Ethiopia’s street-side juice bars. Stop by for a vitamin hit when you just can’t take any more coffee. Chunks of meat, fried in niter kibbeh (clarified butter) and served still sizzling – there’s no messing around with tibs. Combination of our vegan dishes; Red lentil, spilt peas, collard greens, cabbage and carrots.
SPECIALS
Siga wot (beef) and misir wot (lentils, a good option for vegetarians) are other common types to try. For good doro, drop in at Kategna, a trendy place in Bole known for its modern takes on traditional classics. A national favourite, it can be made from pretty much anything, but doro (chicken) is by far the most popular choice. Expect tons of heat – berbere, a tongue-tingling concoction of chilli powder, ginger, fenugreek, cardamom, garlic and other spices, is used heavily – and rich flavours. Minced beef tartare seasoned with mitmita, exotic spices, and Enat’s spiced butter, served with a side of ayib and gomen. The lentils (red and yellow), and cabbage dishes were by far my favorite and the most flavorful.
MISER/RED LENTILS
Because of its richness however, it's often served with other dishes such as minced spinach or alb, a crumbly cheese somewhat like cottage cheese. These extras offer a welcome contrast to the richness of the meat and make the already substantial dish into a full meal. Second, it gets its leavening (and spongy texture and uniquely tangy flavor) through fermentation, much like a sourdough.
While tere siga, like most Ethiopian dishes, is served with injera, it also comes with a knife so diners can slice off bite-sized pieces at will. One legend states that it was first devised by military operatives in the 16th century as a way for soldiers to get their protein fix without lighting fires and being detected by enemy forces. The dish's popularity today makes an odd kind of sense in light on the heavily vegetarian diet kept by Ethiopia's majority Christian population. While observant Christians do forgo meat and dairy for nearly half the days of the year, most are not strict vegetarians. So on the days when their faith allows meat, they're happy to go all in. While Ethiopian cooking celebrates meat in all forms, it also has a long tradition of vegetarian cooking.
Lunch around the world: Must-try international restaurants from Ethiopian to Dominican - Charlotte Observer
Lunch around the world: Must-try international restaurants from Ethiopian to Dominican.
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But this concept is far from new, and Ethiopian cooks have been implicitly following the principles of nose-to-tail cooking all along. A case in point is dulet, a hearty dish of multiple cuts of meat – including tripe, liver, and lean meat – cut into small pieces and cooked together with a flavorful mixture of butter, chile, cardamon, onions, and pepper. The contrasting textures, from the chewy tripe and creamy liver, combine with the spices into a tantalizing whole. Even if you're not a huge fan of organ meat, this deeply flavored, protein-rich dish might change your mind. If you're a hard-core carnivore and resent the way vegetables and sauce get in the way of your meat in stews or other preparations, tere siga needs to be on your radar the next time you go out for Ethiopian food. One of Ethiopia's many meatless specialties is shiro, a highly seasoned puree of chickpeas or other legumes.
Served with fresh diced onions, tomatoes, garlic and jalapeno peppers. Beef cubes slowly simmered in our traditional berbere sauce, onions, Ethiopian spices, and butter. Lean ground beef mixed with mitmita, spiced butter, ayib and peppers rolled with injera.
As the foundation of almost all Ethiopian food, injera is bread, utensil and plate rolled into one. It’s a sour, tangy flatbread made from the super grain teff, which has a spongy texture, ideal for soaking up flavour. Meals often come served dolloped onto a large, circular injera, a colourful palette of delicious curry-like stews, fresh salads and sautéed vegetables. Your choice of protein, cooked with additional high heat to make it crispy.
And while coffee has long been part of the Ethiopian landscape, it's never been taken for granted. The traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony –- which you can experience yourself if you find the right restaurant, even in the U.S. –- shows the culture's reverence for coffee. First, the serving table is scattered with fresh grass to evoke the outdoors. Next, the hostess lights a stick of incense before showing the guests a pan of green coffee beans, which she roasts over an open flame before grinding.
From hearty, tongue-tingling stews and all-purpose flatbread, to powerful home-brewed honey wine, there’s nothing quite like eating out in Ethiopia. Gluten Free injera is a sour fermented flatbread with a slightly spongy texture, made out of our special teff flour. We were looking for a nice local restaurant to eat at during our trip to Charlotte, and we decided to try out Abugida's. We didn't quite know what we wanted, and the knowledgeable server gave us excellent recommendations as to what to order for first-timers.
Subtly spiced, and often accompanied with chilli, garlic and minced onions, shiro can vary slightly from region to region depending on available ingredients, but its distinctive colour and creamy texture are ubiquitous. In more traditional restaurants, it’s served in a small clay pot taken straight from the stove, red hot, bubbling and spluttering. Head to Tsige Shiro, a specialist shiro place in Bole, Addis Ababa. Your choice of protein, diced into cubed shape and cooked with our spicy Awaze sauce along with fresh tomatoes, onions, jalapeno peppers, garlic and butter.
The ceremony coffee comes with a burning of Frankincense which was very calming and relaxing. The coffee is strong, hot and very good, very much in the traditional Ethiopian style... If you're a vegetarian -– or an omnivore who wants something lighter to balance out a rich meat dish -– beyainatu is exactly what you need.
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