02/29/2024
Oldest tradition (Winnipeg Free Press)
At Habesha Ethiopian Restaurant (594 Ellice Ave.), Mimi Tesema’s kitchen is redolent with fenugreek, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom and coriander, and the distinct scent of fresh coffee.
Every Sunday Tesema clears the space on the floor of her restaurant to brew coffee and make popcorn. It’s an important ritual, linking her to her youth in Ethiopia, where buna kurse is part of life.
The coffee ceremony is one of the country’s oldest traditions.
“Coffee is meant as a contact, to be part of the culture and the community,” Tesema explains. “When you make coffee, you call your neighbours, you say ‘Coffee is ready,’ and you have dabo with it, a spiced bread made with Ajwain and cumin seeds and baked in banana leaves. You drink three cups, you sit a few hours and then you go.”
Tesema opened the restaurant in September 2020 during the pandemic. It’s always been her dream to be a restaurateur. It’s in her blood; her mother owns a restaurant in Nazret, a town about 100 kilometres south of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
RUTH BONNEVILLE / FREE PRESS
Mimi Tesema, chef-owner at Habesha Restaurant, says the coffee ceremony is one of Ethiopia’s oldest traditions.
RUTH BONNEVILLE / FREE PRESS
Mimi Tesema, chef-owner at Habesha Restaurant, says the coffee ceremony is one of Ethiopia’s oldest traditions.
She’s made sure the menu includes her favourite dish, kitfo, which she recommends having with cottage cheese and kale.
“It’s raw minced beef, marinated in a spice mix called mitmita and niter kibbeh, clarified butter infused with herbs and spice. It’s delicious.
“We also make a spicy chicken stew, doro wat, with whole and ground spices. We usually make it during holidays back home, but we have it at the restaurant here every day.”
In Habesha, coffee and popcorn is served on Sundays, but they’re also offered at the end of the meal — a meal that, of course, features injera.
The thin bread, made with teff flour and water batter allowed to ferment, is the cornerstone of Ethiopian cuisine.
“Without injera there is no Ethiopian food,” Tesema says with a laugh.
The spongy, slightly sour flatbread, a little thicker than a crepe, has a porous surface, making it the perfect vehicle for the robustly flavoured stews, known as wats, that sit atop it.
Served on large communal plate, it serves as both as a carrier for dishes and a utensil.
At Habesha, each injera meal is served with seven or eight different kinds of wats, including a red lentil stew and two kinds of beef stew, one cooked with berbere, a typically Ethiopian hot and peppery spice made from chilies, holy basil seeds, nigella seeds and fenugreek. The other less spicy stew is made with turmeric.
