Eriterean and the origins of Voyages

To our great relief Eriterean food turned out to be as exciting and interesting as we'd hoped. We'd been desparate to try it for ages (in fact, the Eriteran restaurants scattered about South London were the inspiration for this blog) and it's promptly catapoulted itself to one of Boy & Schwester's favourite cuisines.

We ate at Adulis on the Brixton Road which we'd highly recommend. We went with AJ & UG and shared the combination platter. We got a huge tray, covered with injera, the flatbread made of fermented rice and wheat flour, with 8 different vegetable and meat dishes on top. We're going to try to remember what they all were but it varies every time you go so it wouldn't be much help anyway.

What we can say was that it was all very good - the Adulis Special lamb dish was great, really flavoursome and fresh. The Dorho (chicken stew) was good, very spicy and unusually had a hard boiled egg in it. We also had a fish dish called Assa Tibsi which is Red Sea Grouper marinated in hot pepper sauce and fried in olive oil that was very tasty. It was one of the lighter dishes we ate. The vegetable dishes were equally exciting - we had the spinach, the alicha (a curry dish with carrots, green beans and cabbage) and the timtmo, a lentil dish. The cuisine reminds me of a sort of combination of middle Eastern, north African and Indian. It's no wonder Schwester likes it, since that's a combination of her favourites.

You eat without cutlery and use injera to scoop up mouthfuls of food. On it's own injera is a little sour but eaten with the other dishes it was a wonderful balance to the spice of the food.

We also drank Eriteran honey wine, which was lovely but an acquired taste. It's made of honey (sorry to state the obvious) and has a distinctive smokey flavour from being fermented in barrels which have been smoked using Geso twigs. We followed the meal with coffee which in Eriteria comes with a great ceremony. The beans are roasted in a pan in front of you so the smell is amazing. They are then taken away to be made into coffee and in the meantime a large bowl of popped kernels (pop corn to you and I) is brought out. The coffee then returns in a great coffee pot (see the picture) which has a horse hair filter at the top. You are then poured very small cups of coffee while frankincense burns as you drink.


We paid £20 each for our meal which included a tip. It was well worth it and is probably one of the best value meals we've eaten in a long time. We'd recommend Eriteran food at the drop of a hat and are looking forward to going to other Eriteran restaurants to start comparing them.