Ethiopian cusine

There are several Ethiopian restaurants throughout Joburg downtown city centre and if your window happens to be open and you're not blasting the newest hottest beats on your ipod, you can actually hear snippets of hymnal, etherical music slithering down the high buildings into the streets below.

Having never been to Ethiopia and if I am honest only having a mild interest in actually visiting the place, when my friends suggested we eat at an Ethiopian restaurant I was excited. We were going to a real Ethiopian restaurant. The kind that are owned and frequented by Ethiopians rather than some gimic to attract foreigners or some rich guy'S folly with exotic foods.

It wasn't exactly what I expected. The music, the decor and the people were spot on. What I hadn't expected was for all the patrons of the restaurant to stare at us as we entered. That we would be the only Non Ethiopians there to me seemed uber strange. We were in the middle of Joburg city centre. I mean surely there some South African that like Ethiopian food just as others like chinese food... right? Wrong.... It also seemed to me that the restaurant was not just a place that serves food but some kind of refuge for its regular customers. So our presence there somehow seemed to unsettle people, they were more annoyed than intrigued.

Maybe this is attributed to the fact that the place is not really meant to entertain people like myself who know fokol about Ethiopia or its food. I would have walked in and asked for a beer.. There is no beer.. DUH! I would have waited to see a menu.. there weren't any menu's and if they were they probably weren't written in English..

Luckily my friends had done this before.. but even they ran into difficulty when all of sudden we got another platter of meat and some of the meat looked really really raw... It was raw (it was supposed to be).

Besides the things I could obviously identify, like beef or cabbage, I mostly had no idea what I was eating. My friends were able to explain some and I would have asked the waiter but he didn't speak English too well. The food was light and for the most part I really enjoyed it. I would have loved to know more.. but thats the tourist vibes in me..

I'll be going back though.. Like it or not..