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Ethiopian Savory Scoops

Café Lalibela’s ethnic menu offers pungent bites of tradition

Upon entering Café Lalibela you can smell the heady aroma of cardamom, cinnamon, ground chilies, ginger, turmeric, garlic and onion. This enticing smell is the first clue that you are in for a truly different experience, for restaurants like these are still somewhat rare in our state.

“Everything we cook is from scratch,” manager Sam Alemu says with pride. “We don’t use any canned food. These are our own recipes, and the cook (Atsade Desta) is from Ethiopia. We have had the same recipes for the last nine years.”

Alemu runs the restaurant for his cousin, computer programmer Telahoun Molla, who with his wife originally opened the restaurant in north Phoenix before relocating it in a small strip mall on University. Typical of many mom-and-pop operations, the Mollas started small, and built a solid clientele.

“When we opened this location it was 1,000 square feet, half the size of what we have now,” Alemu says, adding that at the former site, “the only business we had was on weekends.”

Now the restaurant is busy nightly, with tables of students, families, and professionals, including, Amelu says, “people who used to work in Ethiopia a long time ago – like 30 or 40 years ago, in the Peace Corps.”

GO FOR IT

Alemu says first timers should be open-minded and just relax to enjoy the experience of true finger food, which is cut into small, bite-sized pieces that are easy to maneuver.

For example, there are individual platters offering a serving of a meat entrée plus vegetable sides and small salad. The Chef’s Favorite Combination ($10.95) serves up a spicy chicken (doro wat) simmered in berbere, chopped collard greens cooked with slices of garlic and onion (gomen) and ayeb, a homemade cheese, garnished with salad and served with the country’s traditional bread, injera.

Injera is soft, crepe-like flat bread made from teff, a grain indigenous to Ethiopia, mixed and baked with wheat flour. It has a slight sourdough taste, which complements the spicy entrées and veggies.

Seen throughout Lalibela’s menu is wat, the stew that forms the basis of Ethiopian food. It comes in two styles: berbere, a red stew, is a blend of ground red chilies and spices with a subtle fieriness that lingers on the tongue; alicha wat is a milder, yellow-colored stew made with turmeric.

Alemu says the most popular dish is pan-fried lamb (yebeg sega tibs), which is cubed and cooked with jalapeños, onion, rosemary and a traditional spicy paste (awaze) made from berbere.

ENJOY YOUR VEGGIES

Vegetarians will find much to like here, as there is a wide variety (most priced at $3.95), from yellow split peas cooked with onion and turmeric (yekik alicha) and spicy red split lentils served in a berbere, to string beans cooked with carrots (fosolia) and lightly spiced cooked cabbage, potatoes and carrots (tikl gomen).

Meat lovers will find beef, lamb and chicken dishes, but don’t look for pork. Seafood, save for the cafe’s asa wat, a vegetarian fish stew (($4.95), also is not part of the traditional menu.

Order the spiced tea, served hot or iced, or a good cold beer; either goes perfectly with the piquant food.

Café Lalibela is named after both a mystical Ethiopian place and a famous leader, who built a remarkable kingdom of churches hewn from solid rock. The country itself has a reputation for being a steadfast keeper of faith. Such adherence to tradition is evident in its native foods, for which we can all give thanks.