Restaurant: Damera
Location: Goldhawk Road
By Boeing: 435 miles
By Boris Bike: 2.1 miles
Generally after a Fork and Flag I pack my bag, wind my pocket watch, apply a moist lemon-scented cleansing square to my brow and board a Boeing for distant climes. But after leaving ambient Asmara it was a mere amble over the border to Addis Adaba, in Ethiopia. Though the two countries share common ancestral tradition and cultural beliefs Ethiopia is very much the bigger brother. Thought to be the origin of the modern human it is an ancient land that traded Gold with phaoronic Egypt. Until modern times it was known as Abyssinia, a rich, verdant land that inspired the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to conjure a romantic image of African purity and beauty in his opium induced tale of Kubla Khan.
‘There was an Abyssinian maid, and on a Dulcimer she played.’
But though Ethiopia is one of the richest countries in Africa, the source of the Blue Nile and set to become the largest exporter of flowers in the world in English eyes it is still seen as a land of hunger and hopelessness as a result of the famines of the 1980s. Though over twenty years ago the images are seared into the consciousness. It was therefore a pleasing surprise to walk into Damera and be greeted with sprawling pot plants, vivid paintings depicting wildlife in lush vegetation and evocative wooden statues of leopards and Giraffes. This was a new, most welcome vision of Ethiopia. The tall, dapper, distinguished owner, clearly bristling with pride to play host to western custom, greeted us and beamed back a smile as we complimented him on the charming ambience he had created. Draped foliage, splashes of colour on crammed shelves and deep red tablecloths gave it a comfortable, convivial air and a shabby elegance.
While looking at the menu I ordered some traditional honey wine that has been in this part of East Africa for millennia. It is a sad trend in many restaurants I have visited that authentic dishes have given way to popular but bland western alternatives. In the cut and thrust of London gastronomy it is all too easy to water down authentic flavours in the quest for regular custom. But a discerning diner will always look for distinctive tastes. Honey wine was certainly that: expecting a vine variation of mead it was instead reminiscent of an old fashioned lemonade that has fermented in the sun dappled tramlines of a lawn tennis court.
Having just come from neighbouring Eritrea I knew that this Tuesday would indeed be a Shrove Tuesday, though with aromatic stews rather than a sprinkling of sugar and a squeeze of lemon as the filling. But my fellow diner assured me that Ethiopian cuisine had a distinctive ingredient so subtle, and so lip-lickingly scrumptious that this would be the first of many visits. I was intrigued. Many people become obsessed by glamorous celebrities or sumptuous sports cars. Some even find enlightenment in memorisingthe time of every train on the Basingstoke branch line. But my dining companion is the first i’ve met who is fixated by clarified butter. The taste, he claimed, of Nitter Kibeh, a clarified butter made with garlic, ginger and spice, was so moreish that it would have me coming back time and time again for a sample. I could see in his frenzied speech, his feral eyes, that butter, for him, was the altar at which he worshipped; his chancel, his confessional, his conduit to Christ.
For all I knew he could have funded the evening’s fix by pick-pocketing on the Piccadilly Line or selling one of his kidneys on the black-market just to feel that churned, clarified taste one more time. Food does funny things to people: five minutes in the presence of Gordon Ramsay is testament to that. But this was different, there was something verging on the sinister about his preference of butter as a basting agent.
By now our group had swelled to five and we ordered various platters with a gay abandon only gluttony can inspire. Shortly after, an enormous Injera arrived with splats of spicy split beans, patches of pulses and dollops of devilishly hot stew. It looked like an edible paint palette, with different textures and tints all demanding to be wrapped in a jagged corner of Injera and ingested. And there, in the middle, bubbling and burbling in its own Lurpaky loveliness, the ground beef in Nitter Kibeh. Like any addict my friend was lost in a feverish frenzy of ribald reliance. He was there in person but in spirit he had ascended to heaven to join Saint Ivel. The rest of us tried to prize a few grams from the palisade of jutting elbows he had erected around it. It was, I confess, quite, quite delicious. An Injera the size of a dustbin led was hacked and hewn to pieces as if we were a baying pack of wolves around a carrion carcass.
In one thoroughly entertaining evening Ethiopia proved itself to be a land of plenty. When February comes around and a pathetic pancake limps out of my pokey pan i’ll jump in a taxi to the Goldhawk road and salivate at the sheer circumference of the Injera. With butter you ask? I’ll clarify that nearer the time.
