[Guest Post] Addis Ababa – Ethiopian Dining in Amsterdam

admin June 18, 2013January 16, 2016 0 Comments

Hi everyone, this is Peter again! After reading Fon’s awesome guest post, I got inspired to write a new post of one of the restaurants I visited recently in Amsterdam.

This time I went with a few friends to an Ethiopian restaurant in Amsterdam. None of us had ever tried Ethiopian food before, so everyone was excited.

The name of the restaurant is called “Addis Ababa”, which is named after the capital of Ethiopia. My knowledge of this country is very limited, so I was eager to learn something more about the food culture.

(Source: Google Street View)

The restaurant is quite small and doesn’t look very appealing from the outside. It is located outside of the tourist area, so most of its visitors were local people from Amsterdam. The staff came from Africa, and they didn’t speak Dutch very well.

We ordered a ‘Addis Ababa Speciaal (ምርጥ)’, which is a gigantic fluffy pancake, with beef, lamb, chicken egg, vegetables, lentils, spicy pea flour sauce, spinach with cottage cheese and salad on top of it. The dish was so huge, that it barely fitted on our table. All ingredients looked very colorful and exotic and it was more than enough for four persons.

The big pancake was served with a basket of separate pancakes. The idea is to tear a piece of the individual pancake and then to scoop some of the sauce and meat on the pancake. I bet that Ethiopian people are really handy in doing this but we sucked at it, so we ordered plates and cutlery.

The funny thing about eating Ethiopian food is to observe how everyone is digging through the pancake. You can exactly tell who eats quickly and who eats slowly. It is really about social dining, which makes it much more fun compared to standard Western dining. It reminded me a bit of the dinners I had in Asia (and in Vancouver :p), where most of the meals are shared too.

However, one of the downsides was that the food became quite cold soon, probably because we were sitting outside. Also, the flavor of the pancakes was a bit plain in my opinion. All in all, it was a interesting dining experience and it was really cheap! (20 Euros per person ($27 CAD), including drinks).

Based on these reasons: