Although the menu looked promising, I opted for an Ethiopian lunch over pizza at an Italian restaurant in the heart of Ethiopia.

Our Italian Food Experiment In Awassa, Ethiopia

Awassa (also spelled Hawassa) is the capital of the Sidama Region of Ethiopia. Located on Lake Hawassa in the Great Rift Valley, it is a city of almost 600,000 people. As far as I could tell, this region of Ethiopia does not see a lot of visitors.

Our hosts wanted to treat us to Italian food (I find Italian food in Ethiopia a bit ironic, considering the Italians failed to colonize Ethiopia twice). Um, sure, why not…

We went to a restaurant called Venezia, a cute restaurant with indoor and outdoor seating.

The menu actually looked decent. But when ordering roasted lamb, they were out. Milanese cutlet? Out. Roasted chicken? Out.

But there was pizza…

My friends ordered pizza and it looked pretty good…

But I ordered Ethiopian food, yes, I opted for the local beyaynetu over the Italian.

So what’s on my plate?

• The spongy bread underneath is injera, made from teff, a tiny grain native to Ethiopia
• On top are multiple small servings of different dishes, typically including:
  • Misir wot – red lentils in a spicy berbere sauce (center, reddish-orange)
  • Ater kik alicha – yellow split peas cooked with turmeric (yellow mound)
  • Gomen – chopped collard greens (dark green)
  • Fosolia – sautéed green beans and carrots
  • Salata – tomato and onion salad
  • Shiro or chickpea stew (sometimes creamy)
  • Lentils in alicha – brown lentils (bottom right)

For regular readers, you know that I love my comfort food and take that sometimes to an extreme and arguably absurd degree (like Taco Bell in Thailand and Malaysia…).

But I actually really like Ethiopian food and this was a delicious lunch.

As for my favorite Ethiopian food, the next day we went to a traditional place and had lamb tibs (sautéed cubes of lamb, often cooked with onions, garlic, and other vegetables or herbs). You eat with your fingers, oy…

But it was so wonderful!

So in what may be a first for me, I turned down Western food for the local cuisine…see, there’s hope for me yet!