Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, my best friend attends French classes at Alliance Ethio- Française. I join her there every once in a while. Her classes start at 9 AM, and I usually get there around 10 or 11. I wait for her at the café, reading a book or listening to a new album. She finishes her class at 12 and joins me at my table. It’s not long before we’re hungry. Sometimes, we choose to split a pizza. Sometimes, we get tuna sandwiches. But, although the café’s food is cheap, it is still often beyond our budget. And so, most days we step out of the compound for some ertib. For just 20 Birr each, we can get our fill from the now popular street food. When we feel a bit more adventurous, we throw in an extra 10 birr and get some avocadoes in our sandwich. It seems a weird addition, considering ertib’s driving taste is the spiciness, but somehow, it works. We take the sandwiches and go back to Alliance to have our lunch. We make our way to the steps this time, shuffling about under the waning shade of a tree.

Before I take a bite from the sandwich itself, I typically munch on the excess potatoes first. It often reminds me of this quote I read on “Reader’s Digest” many years ago that went something like this: “Cheese is the ultimate villain; slice it, dice it, melt it – it’s still good to go, it still tastes amazing.” Now I, a dedicated lover of cheese, wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment; cheese is definitely the ultimate villain. But there is something about the additional accessibility of potatoes that makes me wish there was a similar ode to the universal vegetable. You could grill, mash, bake, boil, or roast potatoes and end up with a fantastic meal. And ertib, with its halfway fried, mitmita coated potatoes layered in warm bread is just that – a fantastic meal. But ertib isn’t the only potato-based fast food popular on the streets of Addis. Fries, or chips as I and other locals prefer to call them, are perhaps the most quintessential street food in today’s Addis Ababa. You can find chips stand in pretty much every locality, but the most popular spot for one is undoubtedly near high schools. Teenagers, having limited funds and being perpetually hungry, are prime customers for such stands. My own high-school memories are riddled with loud conversations held between mouthfuls of chips.

"You could grill, mash, bake, boil, or roast potatoes and end up with a fantastic meal. And ertib, with its halfway fried, mitmita coated potatoes layered in warm bread is just that – a fantastic meal."

Along with the chips, other fried goodies such as sambusas and pastis (or chornake), populate these stands. Sambusas, commonly known as samosas in most of Asia, are little triangle shaped snacks that are often packed with spicy lentil filling while pastis are basically deep-fried Ethiopian dumplings. These two snacks have a long history in Ethiopian street food, imprinting in the memories of many of Addis Ababa University’s first and second generation of graduates, with plenty of them rushing to pasti bets in particular when they opted out of, or missed the campus cafeteria’s breakfast. And although the etymology of the word “pasti” suggests Italian origin, the snack has definitely morphed into an unmistakable Ethiopian dish. The same can be said of our bombolinos. Originally introduced as the Italian cream-filled doughnut with the name “bombolini”, bombolino successfully infiltrated our cuisine only after shedding its custard filling and toning down its sweetness. The “why” is not really surprising.

Ethiopian food is notoriously spicy and savory, subsequently resulting in our traditional snacks being almost always salty rather than sugary. Kolo, by far the most popular snack in Ethiopia, is evidence of this fact. This assortment of roasted nuts and seeds is telling of our people’s preferred palate. But it doesn’t stop there. The seasonal bekolo (corn) is widely enjoyed as either a boiled or roasted treat during Ethiopia’s rainy kiremt, lacking the sweetness employed in the preparation of most western corn snacks. This absence of the sweet can be partly explained by Ethiopia’s history with sugar. Ethiopia’s modern sugar industry only started in 1951 and widespread availability of refined sugar is still limited in the country. Compare this with the illustrious history of salt, a mineral that was once the most popular form of currency in the region, as well as with the history of other spices, and things begin adding up. This is not to say that Ethiopian cuisine is deprived of anything sweet. Dire Dawa in particular is famous for its sugary treats – Halewa and Mushebek, in particular. But, you would be hard-pressed to find these saccharine treats popular in the rest of Ethiopia. Traditionally, we’ve nursed our sweet tooth by sucking on shenkora (sugar cane), by munching on sweet potatoes, and by employing honey in the creation of various meals such as chechebsa, fetira, and of course, tej. And yet, none of these could be considered dessert. In fact, there is no word for dessert in Amharic. The closest equivalent is ‘tafach’, meaning ‘sweet’. Of the three aforementioned honey-based dishes, only tej could be considered as a “palate cleanser” the same way dessert is in other cuisines, seeing as it’s the only sweet follow-up to a typical Ethiopian meal. But why is that? How has a category of a dish so popular almost everywhere else in the world escaped us? How has a cuisine as ancient as ours fared with little change throughout the centuries?

Now, my bias may be obvious when I say this but, Ethiopian food is really good. A close friend of mine always says that she doesn’t feel like she has eaten if she went without injera for a whole day. And I agree. Our cuisine is filled with comfort food, and injera is at the center of it all. So, it’s kind of surprising we haven’t done more with the wonder grain that’s responsible for the injera we all know and love. I mean, new Teff-based dishes, especially baked ones, are popping up with more frequency in the western world but they have yet to gather steam here. And I suppose it isn’t surprising. Teff is expensive and experimenting with it, especially in a society as conservative as ours, is going to be a difficult endeavor. This is true not just historically but currently as well. During a time when Teff prices have swelled by unimaginable proportions, any of the cereals not used in the making of injera is considered a waste by most families. And rightly so – Injera with wot is a meal; dessert is not. But besides the practicality of the flatbread, Injera also serves a social function.

We Ethiopians are a very community-oriented people and our cuisine reflects that. Injera is meant to be enjoyed communally, not alone. You are much more likely to hear the phrase “enbla”, meaning “let’s eat; share in my food”, whilst dining in one of Addis’s roadside mazer bets than in any one of our restaurants for international cuisine. Sure, you are much more likely to be seated closer together in a prototypical mazer bet than in a contemporary restaurant but the dishes you are served in each establishment also play a major part. Quipping with “enbla” to a stranger may often be a mere act of politeness but it seems much more apt to utilize the phrase when getting ready to dig into your firfir besiga than when cutting a bite from your cordon bleu. But the usage of this term isn’t the only indication of a fostered community at these mazer bets. Often, the customers and the cooks of these establishments are friendly and acquainted. When I used to frequent these spots with my friends, the owner/cook of one of these joints would often inquire if we’d eaten anything that day, readily heaping on extra shiro and misr to help us finish the injera, all while warmly referring to us, gangly 19-year-olds that we were, as her kids.

So, what now? Having established that our street food isn’t that unique, our snacks are almost always salty, dessert doesn’t traditionally exist, and our cuisine isn’t as flexible as it could be, where do we go from here? I, personally, don’t know. You, dear reader, might have come out of this article with the intent to experiment with our cuisine more (and I’ll happily welcome any of your new culinary inventions), but this article was never meant to articulate a “problem”, it was meant to talk about what is. Although I wouldn’t go so far as to stubbornly insist that this is the only way we should enjoy our food, I must admit that I do greatly enjoy how things are. Our food deserves every ode, praise, exaltation, and more. I’m excited to see which direction our cuisine goes. Will we stick to what we like and know or will more of us choose to entertain the prospect of trying something more? Either way, I say to you: enbla.

Cover Photo Credit: Gritty Travel