Although the menu looked promising, I opted for an Ethiopian lunch over pizza at an Italian restaurant in the heart of Ethiopia.
Our Italian Food Experiment In Awassa, Ethiopia
Awassa (also spelled Hawassa) is the capital of the Sidama Region of Ethiopia. Located on Lake Hawassa in the Great Rift Valley, it is a city of almost 600,000 people. As far as I could tell, this region of Ethiopia does not see a lot of visitors.
Our hosts wanted to treat us to Italian food (I find Italian food in Ethiopia a bit ironic, considering the Italians failed to colonize Ethiopia twice). Um, sure, why not…
We went to a restaurant called Venezia, a cute restaurant with indoor and outdoor seating.
The menu actually looked decent. But when ordering roasted lamb, they were out. Milanese cutlet? Out. Roasted chicken? Out.
But there was pizza…
My friends ordered pizza and it looked pretty good…
But I ordered Ethiopian food, yes, I opted for the local beyaynetu over the Italian.
So what’s on my plate?
- The spongy bread underneath is injera, made from teff, a tiny grain native to Ethiopia
- On top are multiple small servings of different dishes, typically including:
- Misir wot – red lentils in a spicy berbere sauce (center, reddish-orange)
- Ater kik alicha – yellow split peas cooked with turmeric (yellow mound)
- Gomen – chopped collard greens (dark green)
- Fosolia – sautéed green beans and carrots
- Salata – tomato and onion salad
- Shiro or chickpea stew (sometimes creamy)
- Lentils in alicha – brown lentils (bottom right)
For regular readers, you know that I love my comfort food and take that sometimes to an extreme and arguably absurd degree (like Taco Bell in Thailand and Malaysia…).
But I actually really like Ethiopian food and this was a delicious lunch.
As for my favorite Ethiopian food, the next day we went to a traditional place and had lamb tibs (sautéed cubes of lamb, often cooked with onions, garlic, and other vegetables or herbs). You eat with your fingers, oy…
But it was so wonderful!
So in what may be a first for me, I turned down Western food for the local cuisine…see, there’s hope for me yet!
Ethiopian food is delicious. Brings back childhood memories for me in my grandparent’s home eating freshly made Injera and Doro Wot.
We have tried Ethiopian food several times in the LA Area (Fairfax), but nothing comes close.
I do see Teff for sale at our local WholeFoods, but we have not attempted making injera at home.
Yeah but if had been a Mexican restaurant, tbe title of this article would have been “Delicious Mexican Food in the Heart of Ethiopia”…
+1, lol
LOL! So true.
LOL, probably!
I am so glad you did not order pizza. I always like to try local cuisine when I go to different countries. It is interesting that most of the times I had a host from the country I was visiting, they tried to take me to restaurants that were not serving local cuisine. I get it, I am the visitor, their opportunity to try something they don’t eat everyday and bill to their company. Great for them but not good for me. I had people from Malaysia take me to a Tony Roma’s in Kuala Lumpur. A French customer took me to an Italian restaurant in Paris. I would always choose Ethiopian food while in Ethiopia.
Sure, when in Rome and all that. Yet some of the best Asian food I ever had was in Puerto Rico.
It depends. I had some absolutely amazing French/modern European food in Tokyo that could rival basically anything served in France.
At the same time I wasn’t particularly impressed by the Japanese food in Tokyo; there wasn’t anything wrong with it, but I don’t really like noodle soups etc, and sashimi/sushi are so highly dependent on the freshness and quality of the raw materials that one needs to do serious research in order to find something that really is better than a high-end sushi restaurant in S. Paulo, London, or another big city with a large Japanese community.
Matthew’s approach is the best way to approach an Italian restaurant outside of Italy. If they don’t do secondi piatti based on meat or fish, you’re better off staying away from the place or at most nibbling on arancini and some kind of salad.
Pizza looks decent, especially compared to those piles of sh#t on your plate. Just another reason not to visit these places. But honestly I am shocked to see they actually have food there after trying to scam Americans for decades saying they are “starving”.
Just another reason why you can’t trust these foreign countries when they beg for aid.
We’re too busy denying our own people food assistance back home… thanks Republicans…
He can’t help himself, anything to go off on a racist tangent…
It’s kinda sad, though; I suppose pedaling such hate (like Dave does regularly) is just simply lazy; clearly, folks are not happy with the current state of the country or the world (corruption, inequities, wars, pandemics, etc.), so instead of solving any actual problems, or makin things better for anyone, some, like Dave, etc., think punching-down, excluding others, and claiming their own superiority is the way out; obviously, I disagree with that approach, and will keep speaking out, as you and others should, too. We deserve better than this.
Oh I am well aware we deserve better, on this site as well…the comments section from 3 or 4 years ago was much more pleasant.
This almost makes up for going to Taco Bell in Bangkok ;-)
Remember, I slept through dinner and did not eat anything, but I WOULD HAVE gone to Taco Bell, haha. 😉
It’s the thought that counts!
Matt I was recently in France & opted for Ethiopian food at a nice restaurant in Paris’ 18th arrondissement. I asked the owner why it wasn’t spicy & he said it was because when he emigrated from Addis Ababa, he quickly found that the French people were not big fans of spices. Glad you got some authentic cuisine!
This was very spicy!
Ethiopian food is indeed delicious. But it does lack a bit of variety, so if you spend long enough in Ethiopia (i spent 3 weeks backpacking across the country) and eat the same thing for lunch and dinner everyday, you’ll be quite glad when you hit a major city and find some Italian comfort food, which I did once I made it back to Addis.
Anytime someone less traveled asks about my travels to Ethiopia, I always remark that the pizza is great but unsurprisingly. The Italians weren’t able to colonize but they did leave their mark on the cuisine.
It’s funny about Italians and pizza, because, I gotta say, the traditional pizza in Naples, Italy, was not my thing; undercooked dough; I much prefer the thin, greasy NYC-style. Maybe the pizza gets better the farther away from Italy you go.
I like to eat good local cuisine when I am traveling. That said, sometimes I just get tired of the local specialties and go look for a pizza. But I rarely try Tex-Mex food outside the US, and when I have I’ve been disappointed. At least with pizza, particularly around the Mediterranean, most restaurants know what it is supposed to taste like.
When we lived in Munich, our friends introduced us to a very good Ethiopian restaurant there. When we moved back to Oklahoma, we were able to find a decent one here too. We haven’t visited in a while, but my wife calls the injera bread “pillow bread” because it was so soft.