Oakland Oddessy: Massawa
My friends had long bragged about a nice little Ethiopian place on Haight Street in San Francisco that serves the best food and a delicious honey wine. Nested amongst smoke shops and tie dyed memorabilia, it brings a little culture to an otherwise yuppie/hippie part of town. When we showed up Massawa was mostly empty, a nice escape from the overcrowded streets.
Our server put up politely with my friends flirtations and offered no resistance to our request for as many different entrees as she could fit on our communal plate, the equivalent of a meat combo and a veggie combo with some additional things. For those who are not familiar with Ethiopian cuisine most restaurants will serve everyone’s dinner (assuming it’s not a huge party) on one giant dish over a bed of fluffy and tart Injera, a flat bread used to pinch and grab your food. For appetizers we got an order of Vegetable Sambusa and one of Meat Sambusa.
Our server returned with a bottle of delicious and refreshing honey wine. It was not nearly as sweet as I had feared and combined the flavor of raw honey with the fragrant perfume of mandarins, lychee and grapes. We toasted as our sambusas arrived, accompanied by a third one on the house, and that was not the last generous gesture the kitchen showed us.
The Sambusas there are excellent, crunchy and toasty with a warm sweet and spicy filling, similar to an Indian yellow curry. The meat Sambusa was obviously more savory while the vegetable one was sweeter and conveyed the spices better. After we where done our meal arrived accompanied by a side order vegetarian Alicha, on the house again. I also got a bowl of home made yogurt as relief from the spice but it ended up being a little bit sweeter and less refreshing than I expected.
The Alicha-Beggee (lamb) and vegetarian version where excellent, earthy and spicy with cumin and root vegetables such as potatoes and carrots. The Tsebhi-derho turned out to be a bunch of chicken legs and thighs cooked until the meat was falling off the bone in a spicy tomato sauce. The Zigni was beef simmered in a sauce similar to the chicken, and while perfectly tender it was not as rare as I’ve come to expect from Ethiopian food. For vegetables we got a dab of creamy spinach and a generous mound of okra cooked in a rich sauce of tomato and spices. Overall the same palette dominated our meal: earthy, spicy, sweet and tart. By the end we where absolutely stuffed and doing our best to finish off the remaining chunks of meat and vegetables and mopping up the rich butter enhanced sauces they came in. After surrendering they took our plates and gave us a pitcher of water and we were allowed to just sit there and talk for what felt like a good half an hour. Perhaps we got lucky since my friends are well known at that restaurant and they weren’t busy at the time but I love any place that doesn’t rush its guests out the minute they finish. And while I’ve forgotten how to say “I love you” in Ethiopian already (I told you a friend of mine was flirting with the server) I’ll have a hard time forgetting the flawless service and food I got at Massawa.