Bejte Ethiopia

The other day my partner and I went to this nice Ethiopian restaurant in Schöneberg called Bejte Ethiopia. The food and service were really good. I like this place in particular because in addition to having really tasty “staples” (cooked chickpeas, spiced lentils, cooked kale, tibs, etc)¹ they serve a few varieties of kitfo, which comprises finely minced beef served with spiced butter. Kitfo is what I always wanted French tartar to be. By containing just few ingredients, kitfo really highlights the taste and texture of the beef. The butter is there to add a little fattiness to an otherwise lean dish. With French beef tartar you sort of lose the taste of the beef in a crowd of strong flavours, like dijon mustard, shallots or capers. All in all, I would this is the best Ethiopian place I’ve been to in Berlin.

After we finished up our meal I encountered a strange sensation: I was craving kunefe! Unfortunately there wasn’t anything nearby and I was already super full from eating what felt like 500g of kitfo all on my own, but it got me reflecting on all the other times I’ve had tasty Ethiopian food in the past. While I’ve been to a few places outside of Abu Dhabi, the vast majority of my encounters with Ethiopian cuisine have been at Bonna Anne² in Abu Dhabi. The rumor was always that they shipped in their injera fresh from Addis everyday. Of the ten or fifteen times I went to Bonna Anne while I was living in Abu Dhabi, I always went to the kunefe place next door, Al Aqsa sweets afterwards (I had to look up the name because folks always refered to it as “the kunefe place next to Bonna Anne”). While the sweets place was always mysteriously hot inside, the kunefe was gooey on the bottom, crispy on top, and teeth-curlingly sweet. It seems that I have some sort of pathway burned into my brain that associates good Ethiopian food with kunefe. Moreover, it looks like Bejte Ethiopia is the first restaurant I’ve been to since living in Abu Dhabi that has been good enough to trigger that pathway.