My second tasting of ethiopian food was at a Friday night team dinner at the African horn. What looks like a tiny restaurant has a narrow corridor leading down to a seating area of five to six tables and an outdoor seating area for groups and another seating area that sort of looks like a lounge room with a bright pink armchair. The group seating area has hanging plants and a set of drums out in the front. The tables are of different sizes. The lounge room looking like area has a massive tapestry of a lion and that's also where the toilets are.
A big flag of Ethiopia adorns the wall. The serviettes are red, green, and yellow - the colours of the ethiopian flag. They turned on some ethiopian music for us but shut it off as the restaurant got busy.
The menu has variety with seafood, lamb, goat and beef as well as a large selection of vegetarian dishes. The drinks menu consists of four types of ethiopian beer, ethiopian sparkling water called ambo, ethiopian coffee, cider and wine. The desert menu is scarce with only two items.
As a group, we ordered the banquet option consisting of entree and mains for $28 per person. Pretty good value.
The entrees we received were
1. Fried injera bread with hummus topped with some chilli paste and flavoured with some unknown spice - loved the fried injera bread and the spicy hummus
2. Beef samosa served with a tomato chutney - pretty average and chutney didn't seem to go with the samosa
3. Foccacia bread
The main consisted of a platter served with three meat curries, a salad, two lentil curries and a cabbage carrot curry laid on top of a massive injera bread. Th inner bread is quite rubbery and has a slightly sour taste but goes well with the curries.
We didn't know which meat we were eating and the service staff didn't introduce any of the dishes. I found this quite disappointing. No one could guess the meat. Even the black lentils tasted like mince meat. The food can be quite spicy for some. Even the salad had spice in it but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I do not like not knowing what I'm eating though.
My colleagues quite liked the ethiopian beers. the ethiopian sparkling water tasted quite sweet. The chai latte was actually just chai brewed with milk in a teapot.
Service was very very slow. We were all on time and waited almost an hour for drinks and my colleagues sparkling water was the last to arrive. We were the first group too. read more