One event — a tiny restaurant opening in South Tampa on Henderson where a half-dozen restaurants have struggled and failed — has caused me to ring in the new year with a sense of optimism. The return of Ethiopian to the Bay area culinary landscape, after the demise of Ibex a few years ago, might just signify that we're ready to take our place among urban areas with enlightened palates. Ethiopian restaurants like Queen of Sheba are a subtle sign that a city has grown up.
Sheba does not push the boundaries of Ethiopian cuisine, but instead serves tasty and straightforward African home cooking — and that's just fine.
The menu makes it easy for people with even the slightest experience with the food to dive right in. And just two weeks after the place opened its doors, more than a dozen people are doing just that on this Wednesday evening.
The waitstaff is doing a lot of explaining about the food, as are semi-knowledgeable people who've dragged in their friends. So is owner Seble Gizaw. She seems ecstatic to be serving customers, the only breaks in her smile coming when she pauses to detail what's on our plates.
With the slightest prodding she recounts how she convinced the owner of the space to lease it to Sheba based on a catered dinner for 15 that showcased items on the proposed menu. After a few bites, I can see why she had success.
The foundation — both literally and figuratively — of Ethiopian cuisine is an unleavened bread called injera. It serves as utensil, platter and side dish, all in one. Injera is made from teff, a tough, nutritious grain that's prevalent throughout Ethiopia. It contains almost no gluten, so the dough can't rise, but injera does use yeast for fermentation, giving the pancake-like bread its characteristic bubbly interior and slightly tart flavor.
There's plenty of injera on the tables at Queen of Sheba, to compensate for the lack of silverware. All the food is served in discrete piles on giant discs of the bread, family style. If you're unfamiliar with the cuisine, you'll want to try everything, and with Sheba's vegetarian and meat samplers, it isn't that difficult. Four of us manage to rack up almost 20 different menu items without straining our bellies or wallets.
Tear a strip of injera (either right off the platter of food or from the rolled sections served on the side) and start reaching in, using the bread to scoop the pastes, stews and chunks. Don't ask for silverware — although Gizaw will happily hand some over — just do your best. Finding it difficult to tear into that chicken leg with injera-covered fingers? Drop the bread and go for it, my friend. It's an experience. One sublime pleasure of Ethiopian cuisine is consuming the sauce-soaked injera left on the plate when the rest of the food is gone.
Most of Sheba's meat dishes are either stewed with onions and ginger (wot) or sauteed with onions, green peppers and rosemary (tibs). Berbere adds a blast of chile heat and fragrant spice to doro wot ($10.99), although Sheba tends to underplay the spice in this classically fiery dish. Anyone who needs it even milder should stick with alecha wot ($10.99), which forgoes the berbere. Either way, the silky and rich sauce coats chicken legs and hard-boiled eggs, or hunks of tender beef.
Wot's simplest expression at Sheba comes in a sauté of shrimp doused in the usual spices ($13.99). The giant pile of shellfish is ideally cooked and coated in just enough berbere to add a hint of heat and salt, drier than the stewed wot but with flavors that seem more distilled.
Tibs comes in lamb, beef or chicken varieties ($9.99-$10.99) — but not pork, which is proscribed by the Muslim and Ethiopian Orthodox Christian churches. Although the gamey flavor of lamb melds best with the pungent rosemary and green peppers in this dish, it tends to be a bit chewier than the other meats.
Vegetarian dishes are split evenly between pulses — like split lentils served with the same spices as the meat wot and split peas laced with golden turmeric (both $7.99) — and stewed greens and root vegetables like collards or potatoes. This is where Queen of Sheba, and Ethiopian cuisine in general, really shines, offering vegetarian meals that are profoundly seasoned and easily the equal of the meat side of the menu.
Of course, if you are a vegetarian, you'll miss one of the best items at Sheba. Gizaw laughs when we order kitfo ($11.99), a simple dish of ground beef seasoned with berbere. She cocks her head and explains that Ethiopians eat it raw. We're game.
The first bite is surprising, not so much for its rawness — I do love rare meat, after all — but for the fact that it's warm, right around body temperature. Get over that and you're bound to enjoy kitfo, every tender grain of meat carrying a bit of spicy heat and hint of cardamom. When we compliment the beef, Gizaw explains that she's always felt her recipe would make a damn fine burger. She's right, and by the time we leave we may have convinced her to cook the kitfo and put it on the lunch menu.
The restaurant also features dips like buticha ($2.99), a loose chickpea paste laced with mustard and hot pepper, or azifah ($2.99), a spicy lentil puree with more mustard, as well as deep-fried fritters stuffed with spicy lentils or minced beef ($2.99).
You can wash it all down with Hakim Stout, a syrupy-sweet dark beer from Harrar in Eastern Ethiopia, but by the time you visit Queen of Sheba, you'll likely have more choices. Gizaw is still working on bringing in other African beers and traditional wines. A better bet for now is shisha, a tea steeped with cardamom, allspice and cinnamon, or coffee served in tiny cups depicting the Queen of Sheba's journey to Jerusalem, with a side of spiced incense.
I can't think of a better way to start a new year of eating than with coffee cup in hand, sated by exceptional raw hamburger and homey stewed eggs, idly wondering if this is the year the Bay area finally starts to take its place among the best dining cities in the country. Queen of Sheba has made me a tad optimistic.
This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2008.