The Blue Nile

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If you go at last to the Ethiopian restaurant nearby, remember this post, or google a bit before making an ethnocentric fool of yourself.

Most of us remember the 1980s when famines turned Ethiopia into one of the poorest countries and starvation was real for 8 million people. One million people died of it. Food is not something we associated with this country - more like the lack of it. But Ethiopia is now one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, and there seems to be at least one Ethiopian restaurant in most good-sized U.S. cities.

At our Ann Arbor Blue Nile, our waitress was a white American, so at least when we goofed and asked for small individual plates and used a fork to scoop up the wat, it wasn't in front of an Ethiopian. Yikes. Oh wait, the owner saw because he brought us more bread, he's Ethiopian. Such humiliation.

In the shot below Don has figured out the technique of tearing off a piece of the stretchy injera bread to scoop up some stew with his fingers. But see, he still has a little plate. And there is that blasted fork. Duh. Individual plates were my idea actually. "Could we get some small plates please?" They had so neglected our needs.

But the thing is, if any person in the world would not make you feel stupid for ignoring the whole point of Ethiopian cuisine - a way to bond by sharing food from the same plate and eating with your fingers - it would be an Ethiopian. I have never met more gracious and genteel people in my life. My sister Nanny's best friend is Elsabeth, from Ethiopia. "Hello Rootie, how are you? How is Don? How is Lesley? How is Peter?" she asks after not seeing me for maybe ten years. I happened to be squeezed in next to her surrounded by thousands at the outdoor Obama rally when he came to campus during his campaign in the summer of 2008. Elsabeth's daughter Kalcadon looks a lot like the painting of a face in the restaurant, top photo.

The table in that same photo, with chairs intimately circled around? That's a mesob - authentically it would be made of straw too, like the conical cover, which you leave over the food until everyone's ready to plow a furrow in the wat with their rolled injera. I am the worst kind of blogger. I research after the experience.

The spices used for wat are similar to Southwestern chili spice and the mix is called berbere, with chile peppers, ginger, cloves, coriander, allspice, rue berries, and ajwain (in Amharic, it's netch azmud and it's a type of caraway seed. By the way, I discovered a spice information page of a German Professor Gernot Katzer, including history and different names of spices in various countries and languages. Brilliant!)

Is every Ethiopian restaurant in the U.S. named The Blue Nile? Almost, I think. I don't know if they are connected, I didn't find out. But it's a good name for an Ethiopian restaurant, of course, since of the Blue Nile's miles - 900, about 560 are inside Ethiopia. The Blue Nile meets the White Nile in Khartoum (Sudan), which means "the place where two rivers meet."

In the next two photos are appetizers, which I liked a bit better than the main course wats. I'm not proud of that, because I'm pretty sure the appetizers are Westernized creations for morons like me. These rolls made with the injera bread are an ingenious way to make me happy though, with fresh veggies inside. Using that stretchy bread for wraps is a good one - easier than sticky rice California rolls, says me.