The guys who run this place are from Eritrea and just the NICEST guys you can imagine. Super sweet, very kind and easygoing, really just genuinely nice people.
The food itself was delicious -- I had the vegetarian platter with red lentils, yellow lentils, and spinach & potato. My boyfriend had a lamb and rice dish. We also had some traditional Yemeni zhug (a green-pepper hot sauce) that was incredibly flavourful and delicious (as long as you like spicy stuff!) Everything was super-tasty.
My boyfriend's dish was more Yemeni (this eatery is known for their "mandi," meat cooked in the ground), but my vegetarian platter seemed more Ethiopian -- it came with injera bread that you eat with your hands. The red lentils were my favorite -- something about the way they were spiced was just really nice -- but I also really liked the potato and spinach. The injera bread was tasty and I found myself taking huge dollops of zhug and smacking it on my injera bread, which was probably totally the wrong thing to do and I have no concept of whether you're supposed to mix Ethiopian food and Yemeni food, ha. Whatever, it was delicious ;)
The place itself is small, cheap and cheerful, with some traditional rooms in the back where you can sit on the floor and eat, Middle-Eastern and North-African style.
The only thing we faulted them for was that the food took FOREVER to arrive. Close to an hour, and the place wasn't that busy. Finally they came out and said there was a problem with my boyfriend's dish and they had to make him something else. They were incredibly nice about the whole thing and they gave him a free dessert to make up for it. But it was a bit unprofessional to make us wait for close to an hour before telling us there was a problem with the dish.
And it wasn't just us -- there were some guys in one of the traditional rooms in the back who came up and complained to the owners in Arabic that they'd been waiting for their food for close to an hour, too. So I don't know what was going on, but hopefully it was just a one-off and next time we go back, the food will be quicker to arrive. read more