African Hideaway

I recently got a ride home from the airport in a cab driven by a guy from Ethiopia. I asked him if there was much difference between the fare at Houston Ethiopian restaurants like Addisaba and the food in his home country. He said most of it is similar, although the injera in Ethiopia has a stronger flavor. Injera is made with an ancient grain called tiff, which is fermented to form a sourdough. Exceptionally nutritious, the tiny grain has gained a following in American health food stores. It has also become expensive. The cab driver suspects that American Ethiopian restaurants are adding other flours to make a "white bread" version of injera.

Maybe that's all for the better, because the first time I visited Addisaba, my dining companion remarked on how sour the flexible flatbread tasted. The two of us split a vegetable combination plate and a meat combination plate on that visit. Since we were sharing, we asked for the two entrée choices to be served all lumped together on one injera-covered platter.

Ordering the combo plates is the easiest way for two diners to get a broad sampling of Ethiopian food in just one visit. The vegetable combo features your choice of five dishes for eight bucks, while the meat combo gives you a choice of three from a short list for a dollar more. The portions are small, but there are a lot of them. And luckily the yedoro wot is among the meats offered.

This cuisine isn't for people on the Atkins diet, since it entails eating an awful lot of bread. In fact, you soon learn that it's better to scoop up large amounts of food with every little piece of injera to cut down on your total bread consumption.

Not wanting to eat any more bread, I nearly skipped the iceberg-and-tomato salad. But when I wrapped a piece in injera and took a bite, I had a hallucinatory pepper rush. Puzzled, I dug around in the salad and realized that what I had thought were green peppers were actually big slices of fresh jalapeño with the seeds still attached. Funny that the most boring-looking thing on the plate proved to be the most incendiary.

When I asked the cab driver which Houston Ethiopian restaurant he liked most, he chose Blue Nile on Richmond. Blue Nile is certainly doing a better job of catering to a mainstream American audience, but in truth, the kifto and yedoro wot at Addisaba are probably a little bit better. And it's a much better place to rendezvous with your secret sources.

Addisaba's location is a little tricky, though. You can find it by driving north on Fondren a few streets past Bellaire. Or you can call a cab.