Well, last night my friend Michelle and I decided to take one of those bold steps, into the unexplored world of Ethiopian food. And this experience was definitely memorable.
(I should probably insert a caveat into this blog before I continue. I am not making ANY sweeping statements about Ethiopian food in general, because I'm sure given the right restaurant with the right dish, it can be incredibly yummy. It just so happened that this particular experience was, um, not the greatest introduction to it...)
So I'd had my eye on this Ethiopian restaurant downtown for awhile now. It's got one of the highest reviews on urbanspoon.com (96% favourable. That's HUGE.) But I just hadn't had an opportunity to go there yet. Then, last night, Michelle and I made plans to meet...for dinner...right in that area. It was perfect! I felt her out with a few options and then casually brought up the Ethiopian restaurant to see how she'd react. "Ooooh, let's try that!" she exclaimed enthusiastically. A fellow risk-taker - YES! I smiled, being reminded that I have fabulous kindred spirit friends. We set off to find the place.
After some searching, we finally arrive at a not-so-cool 5:15pm...seemingly well before the clientelle tends to arrive at this restaurant, because we're quite literally the only people there. The waitress rushes out, finally noticing there are clients. We tell her we'd never had Ethiopian food before. This might have been a mistake, in hindsight. But we were kind of riding the "we're doing something random" high at the time. Anyway, we picked out a nice table in the corner of the restaurant, right by the window.
I can't pinpoint the exact moment...but I think that high must have peaked sometime just before we looked at the menu, and begun to follow a steady declining trajectory from there. Oh boy. I don't recognize any of these menu items! Neither did she. Hmmm. Okay. I'd read online that it was a good idea to try one of the sampling platters if you'd never tried Ethiopian food before, to get a good idea of what the cuisine is like in general. I suggest this to Michelle. "Surrrrrrrre, why not?" she replies willingly. So we go with the veggie and meat platter. Then the waitress asks us which veggies and meat we want. "Uhhhhhh". "Ummmmm". What are our choices? She lists a few. We deliberate with subtle raised eyebrows aimed at one another, mildly uncertain of these unusual choices. We choose the safest options, which are chickpeas, lentils and spinach for veggies (at least we'd heard of all of those), and beef and lamb for meat.
Some time passes. The suspense builds.
Then the food arrives.
We both stare at it with great intrigue. This is certainly interesting. First of all, there are no knives, forks, spoons, chopsticks, or cutlery of ANY kind involved. Instead, there are four rolls of what look like crepes sitting on a plate. Apparently the technique is just to scoop all of the meat and veggies up with these. We each pick one up. We try a small bite. I look up at Michelle, who has professed herself to be quite sensitive to odd food textures. I wonder if she's feeling the same way about them that I am - to me they're kind of like wet crepes with a weird flavour. "Well these are... different!" I say optimistically, trying to put a positive spin on things. She agrees, although I can tell she's also not the biggest fan. Okay, well, maybe with the rest of the food on them the taste won't be as strong, right?
Then we turn our attention to the main dish: the veggies and meat. This has arrived in the form of a giant platter, with piles of each thing on top of...a giant version of those rolled up crepes.
We start to try to sample each of the foods. I quickly learn that the beef is hot enough to set my tongue on fire. Luckily this is NOT a problem for Michelle (who's got a spice tolerance so high she could easily eat a whole scotch bonnet pepper and not even notice the heat.) Okay. We try the lamb. It's not bad. We try the veggies. We both come to the realization that creamed chickpea, spinach OR lentil is not our favourite version of any of these foods. But mainly, we start to struggle because we're forced to eat EVERYTHING with these crepes. It's like eating salad with pancake.... it just doesn't fit! (At least, not for our unaccustomed Western tastebuds...). We try to combine the stuff and make a wrap out of it. That doesn't help. We try it individually again...nope. Our eyes are getting wider. The waitress comes over. She enthusiastically asks us how we like the food. We politely answer "it's good!", not wanting to insult their dish. She leaves. We look at each other. And... we start to crack up. Uncontrollably.
It's hilarious. It's like something out of Seinfeld. Here we are, the only two people in the restaurant, conspicuous as hell, doomed to try to figure out what to do with this giant platter of food we barely even want to look at now, let alone consume. We continue to laugh hysterically as we start trying to strategize about how we're going to at least make it look like we've made a dent in the food. "I'll take the beef, you tackle the lamb" Michelle suggests. I agree. I start to eat it with the crepe, as does she. But we both give up on that strategy rather quickly....because we just can't take anymore of the crepe. So we start to eat with our fingers instead. "Never did I think I would find myself in a situation where I would be eating lamb like popcorn", I admit to Michelle. We nibble away, but it's not really helping to make the plate less full. So we start to look around at the table for alternative strategies. I wonder if we could hide some of it under the candle. Michelle casually starts to spread the creamed veggies around the plate to thin everything out. We attempt to cover some of it up with leftover pieces of crepe. We've resorted to the same strategies used by two-year-olds around the world. Eventually, we decide we've done well enough to make it look like we just both have incredibly small appetites, but not that we didn't want to touch the food. The waitress returns. "You guys are so happy!" she observes. It's true. We might have set a world record for amount of laughter during a dinner. She asks how it's going. She looks down at the plate. "Are you done?" she asks, unsure. "Yes", we reply. "How was it?" she asks. "Good!" "It was very different from anything we've had before!" I add, attempting to infuse a hint of honesty into our response. She takes the plate away.
And Michelle and I breathe an incredibly loud sigh of relief, which probably could have been heard on the other side of town. We head back to the Eaton Centre and buy ourselves some Starbucks drinks, craving the taste of familiar flavours.
Yup... those leap-of-faith, spontaneous adventures are always memorable, all right.
xo Janine
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