Food

Upon landing in Ulaanbaatar, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Mongolian barbecue is not Mongolian at all. Genghis Khan didn’t feed his army on stir fry. Research tells me that a Taiwanese man formulated Mongolian barbecue some years ago, and I think I know why he chose the name that he did. When you use Mongolia as an adjective, it intensifies any noun beside which you place it. Warrior: Mongolian warrior. Vodka: Mongolian vodka. Girlfriend: Mongolian girlfriend. Taiwanese barbecue? Hardly worth a taste.

In the way of intensity, Mongolia doesn’t disappoint. The country is double the size of Turkey, yet there are only two highways, making transport a frontiersman’s undertaking. Temperatures bottomed out at minus -42 degrees when I was there, yet many Mongolians are content to live in circular enclosures made of fabric. These people ambulate nomadically around the country along some of the remotest land in the world, their camps set against lonely winter tableaux, not a soul in sight. It raises some questions: how do they survive? What do they eat? If Mongolian barbecue wasn’t Mongolian, then what dish was Mongolian? I made some effort to answer these questions, and what I discovered is not for the weakly constituted. It is Mongolian, and it is intense.

It is called bodog (bow-dug), and I drove eastward from Ulaanbaatar to find it. My excited local companions (fixer, photographer) bragged that we were driving on a paved road. Just as they said so, the asphalt ran out. Passing a village of clustered huts, where a dirt-faced boy was playing with what appeared to be a juvenile wolf, we left all cars behind. The drive was several hours of frozen streams, snowy pathways, and ravines that howled with emptiness. Forest speckled the hillsides, and I could make out stumps where people had felled trees for fuel. It was a scavenger countryside.

We arrived at a small homestead. Smoke issued from the chimneys of two gers, the traditional Mongolian dwelling. This was the home of a man named Narantunglag, and his wife, Bujinlham. They were each 32 years old, but they looked older, life on the range doing their features no favors. Each year, Narantunglag, Bujinlham, and their three-year-old daughter Bayasgalan picked up stakes with the seasons, moving their herd of sheep, goat, and steer around the country in search of grazing grounds. This area, Terelj, was their winter encampment.

A small corral stood near their gers. One section held a half-dozen undersized cows. In the other, a single goat about knee-high, its fleece a muddy orange, stomped on its hooves, searching nervously for an exit from the wooden stockade. It appeared nervous, though that could have been my imagining, for I knew what was coming.

Malice aforethought: readying for the kill. All photos by Khasar Sandag

It happened quickly. The small door of one of the gers opened, and Narantunglag stepped outside. He was a bit less than six feet tall, and slim. His dogs, a round-up of mongrel pups, nosed at his knees and nipped playfully at his felt boots. Narantunglag’s brother-in-law, Ganzorig, who was a bit younger and smaller but no less solemn about what was to come, followed him out of the ger. The two marched to the corral dressed in their colorful, calf-length national costume, known as a del.

Upon seeing the men, the goat bolted into a corner, then turned around, finding nowhere to go. Ganzorig grabbed the animal by its horns. Narantunglag raised a metal hammer. He aimed at the weak spot of the goat’s crown. With two short blows, the hammer breached the animal’s skull. The goat collapsed to the floor of the corral.

For a moment, the goat lay still. Then its whole body twitched, as though shocked by electrical current. The animal’s legs kicked through a gallop, hooves scattering the hay that marked the ground. The men stood over the goat and watched as the kicking slowed. It stopped. The men were still, as was the goat, the only movement the lonely winter wind.

Narantunglag and Ganzorig slung a rope over the roof that extended halfway over the corral, hanging the goat’s weight by its horns. The animal’s hooded eyeballs suggested a drowsiness as much as death. Its mouth hung slack. Steam curled out between its spread of small herbivore teeth. Ganzorig removed a small, plastic-handled knife from the sash of his del. He made an incision in the goat’s neck, then worked the blade around until he returned to the place he had begun. Blood trickled down the fur and dripped onto the ground. One of the goat’s hind legs pawed at the air, but Ganzorig didn’t notice. He was busy with an ancient Mongolian ritual, by which an animal’s meat is roasted within its own skin.

In Ulaanbaatar, I had met with the president of the Mongolian Cook’s Association, a middle-aged gentleman who bore the given name of the bygone socialist time, Oktyabri (October) Janchiv. He wore blocky, shaded prescription glasses. During our talk, he routinely produced a comb from his jacket pocket and jazzed his black hair upward. He spoke in marbled, academic Russian. I thought of him as the Mongolian Brezhnev, and he knew everything about bodog. He said that bodog dated to the time of the khans. “When Genghis Khan had a victory,” Janchiv said, “he would make bodog for everybody in large banquets.” Janchiv explained that bodog was elemental to the success of the roving Mongol armies, as the process required no crockery. “Mongols were not good with clay or porcelain. So this was the most effective way of cooking at that time.” Even half of civilization is plenty to conquer, and this is how the Mongols did it, without vulnerable food supply lines, killing what they encountered, using an animal’s earthly vessel as the pot and pan that would otherwise weigh down a combatant horseman.

It didn’t take Ganzorig long to expose the vertebrae of the goat’s neck, and soon he had peeled the animal’s fur to the shoulders. The carcass twisted this way and that, as Ganzorig made careful not to puncture the skin, so as to not compromise the air-tight seal the skin would need to make later. Over the next several hours, I watched Narantunglag and Ganzorig slowly divest the goat’s fleece of everything that was held within it, slicing out meat and bone, collecting these pieces on a platter at their feet. With kicks and threats, they kept Narantunglag’s dogs away from the plate. The dogs instead snatched up the bits of fat and tendon that flecked from the goat to the ground.

The men worked with nonchalance, cigarettes dangling from their lips, unaffected by the cold, though they wore little that I would call winter gear. Bundled up in many layers, I was the one ducking inside the main ger to get warm. There was a central stove inside, its chimney running skyward through the small window at the apex of the ger, the only natural light source. Guests were meant to sit on the left side of the room on a daybed, women on a daybed to the right, the man of the house on a chair straight ahead. As is traditional, the furniture was painted orange, with colorful ornamentation. There was a small dresser, backed by a mirror, with a Mickey Mouse Clock tick-tocking the time. Bujinlham perched on a pillow, watching a tiny black-and-white TV screen. (They owned a generator.) A movie was playing, 3:10 to Yuma. It was the more recent vintage of the film, with two wealthy actors pretending to be desperate men clawing out a life on the edge of the landscape. As her daughter chewed on her sweater cuff, Bujinlham could not be bothered, lost in the world of the movie.

Breaking down the goat before the cooking begins

Outside, the goat’s spine snapped a foot beneath its head, and the carcass dropped to the ground. Narantunglag removed the head from where it hung and placed it in a pail. The head’s opened eyes superintended the continued slaughter. The carcass now hanging on a wire run between two spinal vertebrae, Narantunglag worked the knife carefully through bone and tendon. “The ribs and the hips are the hardest,” he said. “You have to be very careful not to rip the skin with your knife. And if you don’t take out the intestines and stomach cleanly, the contents can spill.”

Ganzorig positioned himself on his haunches and supported the goat from underneath, allowing Narantunglag some slack to work the knife around the hips. Blood pooled in a mess of organs. Ganzorig shifted his feet. This caused the blood to slosh around in the goat’s body. The liquid lapped over the skin and splashed Ganzorig’s face. He barely flinched.

Brown pellets issued from the goat’s bowels, spilling like jackpot coins to the ground and mixing with the flecks of tissue on the tamped-down grass and straw. Looking away, I caught sight of Narantunglag’s herd of sheep and goat, which came into view on a nearby hill, dark specks against the snow. The goat that Narantunglag and Ganzorig were dismantling once belonged to that group, and those animals migrated up the incline, pausing now and again to kick at the snow with their hooves and find the grasses underneath it. Over the distance, a sheep’s bleating call reached me, and then the answer of another. When I looked back to the slaughter, I noticed that the pellets were all gone from the ground, along with the tissue, the dogs indiscriminate in their search for protein.

After several hours, with the sun falling over the backside of the hill, the goat was skinned. Narantunglag had broken the carcass’s legs and removed those last bones. The goat’s ruddy, empty fleece hung limply in the crook of his arm. It was time to cook.

Bujinlham brought the platter of meat and bone inside the ger. She added seasoning: salt and pepper, onions, paprika, and the contents of a packet written in Polish. It was called Vigorn, and she sprinkled its dark dust over the meat. She handed the platter to Narantunglag.

A friend of his, Munkhbaatar, had arrived by horse, and along with Ganzorig, they positioned themselves around a fire in front of the ger. Using a pair of metal tongs, Munkhbaatar snatched a stone from the depths of the fire. Narantunglag held open the goat’s fleece, grabbing it around the neck hole. Munkhbaatar placed this hot stone inside it, shoving it into the space of one of the animal’s hind legs.

Stuffing the carcass with hot rocks

The rock sizzled the flesh. Munkhbaatar filled the empty carcass with a layer of scalding stones, then stepped aside. Ganzorig took several pieces of meat from the platter and placed them inside the fleece. The meat contacted the hot stones, and smoke billowed out of the fleece, making it hard to see.

Narantunglag placed another layer of hot stones into the fleece. Ganzorig inserted another layer of meat. The men worked this way quickly, making sure to hold the developing steam and heat inside the carcass until it was full of meat and stones. They closed the neck opening with a metal wire, cinching it tight.

They brought out the blowtorch. After pulling out the animal’s cashmere coat with their fingers, the men stood aside. Settled on the dirt by the fire, the carcass was now a white, hairless ball, stuffed fat, with four floppy appendages. This was a bodog. Narantunglag lit the torch. He directed the flame at the bodog, running it across the entirety of its exterior, slowly charring it brown. I stood back and watched.

Torches to singe the hair and boil the meat inside

In Ulaanbaatar, Oktyabri Janchiv had explained the process of the bodog. “The stones hold heat evenly,” he had said. “So the meat doesn’t undercook or burn. As the stones roast the meat, the steam acts like a pressure cooker. This creates juice that drips down and collects in the bottom of the sack. This juice starts boiling because of the blowtorch from the outside.”

The cooking took almost two hours. We stood around and waited. Narantunglag pointed to the far hill and said that wolves lived up there. They stole down under darkness and attacked his herd. It was a constant worry. He had a rifle, but the wolves were always there.

The men watched over the bodog, searching for signs that it might be time to eat. They knocked the ball with their fists. They looked for oil seeping out of the neck hole. “It lets you know it’s ready,” Ganzorig said. At last, they said the bodog was finished, and Narantunglag carried it inside the ger.

Slicing the Bodog

Grabbing the knife they had used to skin the goat, Narantunglag slit open the bodog lengthwise. The skin crackled as the interior steam hissed into the ger. Narantunglag plucked a rock from inside the bodog and handed it to me. The rock was hot, and he told me to pass it back and forth between my hands, as this would frighten off the evil spirits dwelling within me.

The men removed all of the meat from inside the carcass. They placed the food on a plate and set it on a small table. Then they titled the charred remains of the bodog, pouring its liquid contents into a small metal bowl.

Narantunglag handed me this bowl. It was hard to discern it in the weak light of the ger, but I knew what it was. Its glistening revealed this juice to be pure, distilled fat. The men all watched as I lifted it to my lips. I took a healthy gulp. It was hot and thick, and it slimed its way down.

I have sat in fine restaurants, linen napkin across my lap, the slightest pressure needed from my knife as the mutton slid off the bone. This was not that kind of experience. We sat on the floor around a small card table. We ripped into the meat with knives and daggers and our hands. We passed around a plastic cup, taking turns with the vodka.

Frontier meat for the feasting

Frontier meat tends to be dry. This was not the case with the bodog. The meat was tough in spots, tender in others, but it was uniformly bathed in the animal’s natural oils, making it easy to eat. This original sauce gave the mutton a tang. A byproduct of its proximity to the fiery stones, I figured, the meat also tasted slightly smoked. As I savored the meal, my eye strayed from the table and its piling of meat, falling upon a bowl that sat on the floor next to me. In the bowl was the head of the goat we were eating. One eye lay open, appearing to be focused on me.

“Do you eat this all the time?” I asked the table.

“Traditionally, in winter, this is what we eat,” Narantunglag said. “Meat, meat, meat. It’s what we need to survive the climate.” I reached into my mouth and pulled out a long, orange goat hair.

Ganzorig spoke up. “On TV, we hear people say fat is bad for you,” he said. “We’re thinking that maybe we should have less cholesterol, eat more vegetables. But we believe that cuisine is specific to that country.” He lips were greasy, and blood still dotted his cheeks. He lifted a rib from the pile of meat. “In Mongolia, we believe this is what we need to eat to survive these conditions.”

Having overeaten, I wandered outside. The moon was nearly full, and in its light, the dogs lay motionless on the snow, curled up like empty fleeces. The earth was still. And silent. The exhaust from the ger’s stove filtered into the night. I realized that I had found it, the real Mongolian barbecue, and I wore its smoke and fat and gristle all the way back to Ulaanbaatar.

At last, the Leather Jacket is served: an oblong of fragile white flesh sheathed in wrinkled skin. A shower of sparks erupts from the grill; billowing smoke renders the cooks as wraiths. In the darkness, lilting music drifts from tinny speakers: a lament by Abida Parveen, Pakistan’s Queen of Sufi song. Suddenly, I am gripped by an irrational certainty that—whatever the headlines might augur—Karachi is going to be okay.

Murders brought me to the city, once again. In the past six months, there has been a new spike in what are known here as “targeted killings”—drive-by shootings, usually carried out by gunmen on motorbikes, each a carefully calculated move in a blood-soaked game of Monopoly. Political parties; religious extremists; criminal gangs; Taliban militants: all are locked in a multi-sided turf war waged through murder, extortion and threats. The daily toll ebbs and flows to a mysterious rhythm; though everyone agrees that the city feels less and less safe. No-go zones expand like inkblots. Behind a facade of intoxicating bustle, Pakistan’s “city of light” is slowly turning into a city of invisible divides.

And then there is Biryani of the Seas. The outdoor restaurant sprung up a couple of years ago on a stretch of pavement at the foot of a mottled block of flats in Clifton, a wealthy district of palatial homes and high walls that is both far removed from – and encircled by – Karachi’s grittier suburbs, where life is less certain. As offices empty, a polite crowd comes here to sample some of the best seafood in the city. On good nights there’s the ghost of an Arabian sea breeze.

Syed Ali Raza Abidi, an affable scion of fish exporters, founded Biryani of The Seas in 2010, hiving off a fraction of the catch purchased each day by his family’s industrial-scale business to grill over charcoal then serve at a cluster of plastic tables. An unassuming Impresario, Abidi is to be found each evening overseeing the unhurried relaxed service, while his men work a simple kind of magic with Grouper, Barramundi, Red Snapper and Pangush.

Start with battered hoops of calamari and a buttery makhni made from white prawns – or penaeus indicus as Abidi, in aficionado mode, would insist on calling them. Sesame seeds give the dish ballast; a zing of fresh ginger ensures it hits some notes too. Scoop it up with warm garlic naan, its puffy, blistered surface seared shades of brown to black by the glowing embers.

Next comes a plate laden with Tiger prawns – charred, apostrophe-shaped monsters of serious succulence. The centrepiece, of course, is the Arabian Sea fish known as Leather Jacket – served on foil to preserve its feathery texture, and escorted by roughly chopped quarters of lemon. By rights, such an exquisite meal has no business being hawked on an unprepossessing stretch of sidewalk. For all the shadows gathering over Karachi, the unexpectedly delicate taste of a dish with a name like Leather Jacket is surely evidence for the existence of other, better-concealed charms.

A pause, and then Zafrani Shahi Tukra – the “Royal Dessert” – Pakistan’s answer to bread-and-butter pudding. One of Karachi’s widows has carved a lucrative niche for herself making the sweets for Abidi’s restaurant , and she is liberal with her saffron and almonds. Finally, mugs of sugary milk tea. There is no better fortification ahead of a journey into the Karachi underworld, and no more comforting reminder that however fast the murderous whirligig spins, all in the city will somehow be well.

–

Matthew Green is a Reuters special correspondent covering Pakistan and Afghanistan and author of The Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa’s Most Wanted, a book about Joseph Kony, the leader of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army rebels. www.matthewgreenjournalism.com

When McDonald’s and KFC first opened up in Pakistan in the 1990s, there were manic scenes. Snaking queues, traffic jams for miles and kids running amok in play areas. Burger joints had existed before, but the fried chicken and ‘would you like fries with that’ phenomena swept through the country, paving the way for spinoffs in every neighbourhood and small town.

But long before the golden arches began gleaming through Pakistan, there was always the poor man’s burger: the bun kebab.

The bun kebab builds on the familiar burger formula: it’s a patty in a bun. But its flavors stretch far beyond the western world, combining Pakistanis’ love for spices and fried food, all in one go.

While there are many ways to fill a bun kebab, two patties emerge as the overwhelming favorites on the streets of Karachi: the shami kebab, made from minced meat, egg, chillies and spices such as ground cumin and cinnamon, and a lentil or boiled potato patty, which is soaked in an egg batter before being shallow fried in butter. The condiments are what make it so quintessentially Pakistani: a heap of sliced onions, spicy tamarind chutney, cucumber and tomato slices and a secondary patty just made of beaten egg. It’s served up at roadside cafes or at stalls where people crowd around and wolf them down in minutes, chased with bottles of warm soft drinks. The price? A fraction of what an ‘imported’ burger costs: between 30 cents to half a dollar, compared to a basic McDonald’s cheeseburger ($1.20).

Classic Burger is run by a family who now operates forty bun kebab joints in just one area of Karachi, and have rented out stalls all over the city. Pervaiz Jalal has worked at one for fifteen years. “My maternal uncle Chaudhry Ameer Mohammad came to Karachi from Kashmir forty years ago and set up a cart on Tariq Road. Now our entire family is in the business.”

Every day, the branch Jalal runs sells 250 to 300 bun kebabs, though his take is slightly modernized: it arrives with a side of fries and the bun kebab features ‘colesalad’ and ketchup. The fries, Jalal says, were incorporated based on customer demand. Despite the western touches, Jalal’s best seller remains the lentil and egg patty. “It’s the most delicious one,” he says.

At Nursery Super Bun Kebab, a worker explains between flipping buns that this is because most people don’t trust eating meat from a roadside stall. Nursery Super Bun Kebab – whose specialty is crispy, spiced mincemeat kebabs – also adds sliced beetroot. A bun kebab is good, Jalal says, because of its condiments: the chutney and the vegetables make the dish.

Working the bun kebab assembly line

Watching a bun kebab being prepared is a hypnotic experience. A cook slices the bun and browns it on a griddle with clarified butter. He fries the patty at the same time, pressing it down with a spatula to absorb the fat and crisp it up against the hot surface. He then combines the two, followed by a cascade of condiments, before returning the whole package to the griddle for a final crisping. Eating it isn’t any less of an experience: the warm bun, the juicy patty and the tart chutney combine to form a bold but harmonious package of flavors and textures, making the sketchy hygiene associated with roadside food in Pakistan a bit easier to swallow.

But while the bun kebab continues to thrive, KFC and McDonald’s have been in the news for other reasons. These were once a place for rich kids to hang out at – who were nicknamed ‘burgers’ for their affinity for fast food, American accents and designer clothing. KFC is now a favourite for rioters looking to vent their rage on a blasphemous comic or film. Even though foreign food chains take pains to advertise their affinity to religion by covering the glass doors with Islamic verses, or publicizing that they are owned and operated by Pakistanis, they almost always face the brunt of protesters.

Last September, I trudged through a branch of KFC that had been torn apart by a mob protesting the controversial Innocence of Muslims film. Everything had been looted, from serving trays to packs of ketchup and the air conditioners and bathroom taps. “They’ve even taken our delivery system! That isn’t even of any use to them,” a worker said.

The head of the Jamaat-e-Islami, one of Pakistan’s oldest religious-political parties that identifies with the Muslim Brotherhood, once announced during a speech that, “Food from KFC and McDonald’s does not suit our taste, culture or pockets. Our taste is more suited to the bun kebabs being sold in front of these places.”

Perhaps the bun kebab vendors – who haven’t been attacked or torched – are having the last laugh.

–
Karachi-based Saba Imtiaz reports on politics, culture, militancy, human rights and religious movements. She can be contacted at saba.imtiaz@gmail.com. A list of her recent work is available on her website.

I don’t need you to tell me how fucking good my coffee is, okay? I’m the one who buys it. I know how good it is. When Bonnie goes shopping she buys SHIT. I buy the gourmet expensive stuff because when I drink it I want to taste it. —Jimmie Dimmick, Pulp Fiction (1994)

No doubt Jimmie meant every word he told those two blood-soaked gangsters standing in his living room at daybreak, sipping their mugs of tasty java, but Jimmy’s idea of quality coffee wouldn’t satisfy even the least-dogmatic coffeehound these days. Did the beans come from a single farm, preferably in the sweatiest part of Honduras or Ethiopia? Did he use a burr grinder to whiz the beans into perfect particles no more than 60 seconds before brewing? Did he weigh the coffee and the water and make sure the proportions were just right? Did he brew individual cups for Jules and Vincent in an AeroPress? Or at least a Chemex? Well, then by today’s standards, Jimmie don’t know shit about the gourmet expensive stuff.

**

A bit of (grossly oversimplified) background on how this all got so serious. The coffee origin myth is a particularly romantic one. As it has been told, a 9th century Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi noticed that his flock displayed a certain special vitality after rustling through a patch of red berries. Intrigued, he picked a few berries, gave them a chew, and soon found himself overwhelmed with energy. He took the magical berries to the local monastery, where the head monk, angered by the suggestion that this fruit was somehow special, tossed them into the fire. Soon, the room filled with a warm, toasted aroma. Intrigued, the monk scraped the roasted beans from the ashes, ground them up, infused them into hot water and… magic! Coffee.

For the first thousand or so years, a cup of coffee was, for the most part, a cup of coffee, ground whenever convenient, brewed however possible, consumed more for the energy it imbued than the subtle flavors it gave off. Sufi monks, some of the earliest coffee drinkers, used the magic brew to stay alert during long religious ceremonies.

By the 17th century, coffee had begun to make its way from northern Africa and the Middle East to the western world, first through trade to Venetian merchants, and later to the Americas, where a little brouhaha in the Boston harbor helped turned coffee into the drink of choice for the colonists. Despite some light resistance (opponents called this strange brew “the bitter invention of Satan”), coffee flourished in Europe and the New World as coffeehouses soon became centers of social interaction and political discourse. In the three hundred years since, it’s the West that has been responsible for most of its important innovations, the good (precision grinders), the bad (freeze-dried industrial grounds), and the debatable (Starbucks, pod coffee).

Among the earliest western innovations was espresso, a dense distillation of extracted coffee particles that would go on to change the way much of the world gets their caffeine fix. It wasn’t just the intensity of the beverage itself, but the café culture it spawned. Suddenly a brave new world of caffeinated options appeared on menus, and brewed coffee took a backseat to all the grinding, tamping, and steaming required by the mechanized extraction and its many milky iterations. In this new era, the man behind the bar wasn’t just a faceless peddler of muddy water, but a craftsman, one whose skill was both highly visible and immediately discernible. Thus began the age of the barista.

But espresso had its limits, the coffee nerds eventually discovered, not the least of which was the legion of soccer moms and dilettante dads ordering skinny mocha pumpkin soy lattes covered in cinnamon snow. By the time the 21st century arrived, the purity of the craft had been drowned out by seventeen-syllable drink orders. The response was as prosaic as it was potent: black coffee.

[Trigger warning: if you are angered by people who are deadly serious about their coffee, if hearing them talk unironically about how to make the best single cup of coffee on the planet would send you into a rage, stop reading now. Take a look instead at our less-geeked coffee stories—our mini-documentary on the delightful Department of Coffee in Cape Town, perhaps? However, if you care deeply about coffee, or even are curious about what combination of beans and roasting and water would make others care as deeply as they do, then please, by all means, keep reading.]

If you lived in Sweden, you would drink a lot of coffee, too. In fact, if you lived there during the winter months—when the sun rises around the time you’re sitting down for lunch and sets before you have time to pay the bill—it’s unlikely you’d ever leave the café. You’d have no shortage of places to chose from: the coffeeshop density in Stockholm could rival that of Seattle, Rome or Amsterdam. It’s a place where even bad coffee tastes like a lifeline. Which makes the fact that there are serious coffee people doing serious coffee things in this country all the more impressive.

Drop Coffee is more than just a serious place serving serious coffee. It’s a place that applies a sort of religious piety to the beverage. On the walls you’ll find awards from barista championships, displays of the latest in pourover brew technology, bags of house-roasted beans from tiny farms in places far far away.

At Drop, you can order a latte with art etched into its foamy cap, or an espresso dense and syrupy with notes of wild blueberry. And if you do, you will no doubt be deeply satisfied. But Drop, like most of the serious coffee houses of the world, carries just one type of espresso, focusing most of its energies instead on an extensive and revolving menu of single-origin beans brewed individually to order.

Translation: If you want to taste the caffeine revolution, you’ll need to order that coffee black.

Consider the excruciating path from tree to cup: Drop sources its beans from Central America and Africa, mostly from small farms selling very high-quality fruit for top dollar to a handful of roasters around the world. Once in house, the beans are roasted in a 15-kg Giesen machine for between 13 and 16 minutes.

The roasted beans are measured out in 18-gram portions, then placed whole in little spice bottles and stacked on a shelf behind the baristas. On a given day, you can order from up to eight different single-origin beans, ranging from $6 to $15 for a small pot. When a customer orders a coffee—say, Perci from Panama or Kangocho from Kenya—the beans are ground in a Mahlkonig Guatemala grinder, then measured again on a scale just to make sure. The water, 300 grams of it (“we like a 16.6 to 1 ratio”) is also weighed on a scale.

The coffee goes into a V60, a simple ceramic cone that has become the go-to method for serious baristas in recent years, and a timer is set. Water is added in 75-gram intervals, poured out in tight circles over the course of two-and-a-half minutes—all the better for getting the most even extraction out of the grounds. “Give the coffee some time to cool so you can taste the full bloom,” says Benjamin Norman, a young barista with tattoo sleeves who spends the better part of the afternoon schooling me in the intricate art of pourover brewing.

I do as I’m instructed and wait. Given everything that has gone into this cup, there is a certain pressure not to screw it up. Milk and sugar would be a gross offense to people this precise.

The coffee is from Cerro Azul in Colombia, and as it sits shimmering in my cup, a gentle aroma rises to remind me that what I am about to drink is not like anything I’ve tasted before. The aroma is not of toffee or toasted bread or tobacco, but of red fruit and cut grass. The taste is not stern or brooding, but clean and light, with the bright acidity of a bruised orange peel and a mouthfeel so fickle that the flavor seems to jump right off your tongue as soon as you’ve swallowed.

As Oliver Strand, one of the great chroniclers of modern coffee culture, once wrote about a cup like this: “At first it’s disorienting — the coffee isn’t like any other coffee. Then it’s exciting — the coffee isn’t like any other coffee.”’

Benjamin Norman at work

Guys like Strand consider Scandinavia to be at the center of the coffee world, with places like Copenhagen’s Coffee Collective and Tim Wendelboe, a three-seat coffee temple in Oslo, inspiring pilgrimages from coffeehounds from around the globe. The unifying ethos behind these Scandinavian satellites is lightness.

There are many ways to interpret the language of a bean, and most of that interpretation comes out in the roasting process: roast beans long and hard until they’re dark and oily and you have a certain extreme expression of coffee, not delicate or nuanced, necessarily, but assertive and impacting. Drop Coffee, like its Nordic neighbors, prefers a lighter hand, roasting the beans several minutes shorter than what most drinkers are accustomed to in order to produce a more delicate, nuanced cup of joe.

This may be the direction of coffee to come, but not everyone is a fan of the light-roast movement. When I tell a well-known chef in northern Sweden about my time at Drop, his eyebrows narrow. “I don’t want my coffee to taste like a strawberry.”

But the high priests of pourover coffee just shrug. “Coffee is just a combination of taste and aromas. My job is to bring the best combination forward,” says Erik Rosendahl, one of the owners of Drop Coffee.

Of course, this type of coffee comes at a cost: not just in the price of the cup and in the earnestness with which it is delivered, but in the fact that to truly be enjoyed, it requires your full participation. You can’t order a cup like this through a window and take it to go. And you sure as hell can’t be burr grinding beans and weighing out water and breaking out the timer when you’ve got a couple of gangsters in your living room with a dead body to dispose of. For guys like that, gourmet expensive stuff might as well be anything that’s not Folgers.

Tools of a coffee revolution

The Path to a Better Cup of Coffee

-Burr Grinders: It’s been said by many a coffee expert that you’d be better off with bad beans and a good grinder than a exceptional coffee and a shitty grinder. A bad grinder (like those cheap whirling-blade grinders most people use) breaks the beans down into particles of all sizes, meaning some will be over-extracted and some will be under-extracted, making for a very uneven cup of coffee. Good grinder means a burr-style grinder, which uses rotating plates to ensure the coffee is ground evenly (and without heating up and compromising the beans’ essential oils).

-Water: “It’s 90% of the drink, yet nobody really thinks about it,” says Drop Coffee barista Benjamin Norman. Before going to the World Barista Finals in South America last year, the team trained with a variety of different waters in order to get the perfect product. You’re looking for a relatively hard water, with a mineral content of at least 150-200 parts per million. Play around with tap, filtered and bottled waters to find what works best in your hood.

-Good beans: Look for suppliers that carefully source their beans and roast them in house. Single origin trumps blends anyday. In the US, Intelligentsia in Chicago, Stumptown in Portland, and Counter Culture in Durham are all world-class roasters.

-V60: Not only has it emerged as the most common single-cup brew system in the new coffee universe, but at $15-$20, it’s also the cheapest. The ceramic cone fits right over your mug and allows for a slow, controlled extraction that yields an exceptionally high-quality coffee. All you need is a filter (and, if you really want to get serious, a timer, a scale and a V60 kettle) and you’re ready to brew.

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Bobotie, a savory-sweet mash-up of ground meat, spices and egg, the bedrock of Cape Malay cuisine

There is no easy way to describe the food of a country with a history as complicated as South Africa’s. Take a stroll around the City Bowl in the heart of Cape Town and you can begin to get a sense of the incredible convergence of cultural and economic forces that influence the menu of the day: Cape Malay restaurants serving up the spice-inflected staples brought across the Indian Ocean during the days of slavery; tiny takeout stands dishing up starchy staples like pap and samp and beans for a few rands a plate; hipster burger joints flipping patties made from kudu, ostrich and grass-fed beef destined to be washed down with designer cocktails.

It might feel like a culinary identity crisis, until you consider that this enormous diversity, all there to be consumed within a few short city blocks, is what makes this country what it is.

We may not have sampled the whole of the Cape cornucopia, but we certainly put a good dent in it. We ate abalone wraps from a roadside stand run by an unemployed woman looking for a new path in life. We feasted on great mountains of grilled proteins (called braai in these parts) from a township institution with smoke and fire in its soul. We staggered through an awe-inspiring homemade feast with a Muslim family generous enough to invite two complete strangers into their home during a very special religious celebreation.

In this slideshow you’ll find 42 of the most interesting dishes we came across during out time in South Africa. And yet even after two weeks of prodigious consumption, no clear definition for South African food comes to mind. But that’s exactly what makes this country so damn beautiful.

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Several boys were busily engaged in preparing a supply of food. It consisted of long strips of raw meat, cut form the most fleshy parts of the trek-ox, and attached to a line of string, which encircled the camp altogether.

Noble-born Englishwoman Lady Florence Dixie, war correspondent for the Morning Post during the First Boer War in the 1880’s, was not wholly enthusiastic about the South Africa she found. It was a country at war with Cape Town and the British, a place where Zulu kings languished in prison, where Trekboers—farmers on the move—turned into a guerilla fighting force, and where the fight for land and queen and diamonds wouldn’t be resolved until the far bloodier second war, in which the British would reveal innovations such as the world’s first concentration camps. It was all grim enough that she titled her memoir of those years In the Land of Misfortune.

Of course, the war and its atrocities and the eventual victory of the British crown made South Africa, for better and worse, what it is today. And the same can be said of the principal food of those wars, a delicacy that modern South Africans tend to regard with a sort of Stockholm Syndrome: they love it despite its nature, because they remember in their blood the days when they were captive to it. It is not the best thing that was ever done with the majestic animals of the veldt, but it is unmistakably South African. It is Biltong.

At a distance of a few inches apart hung these long thin strips, presenting the appearance of so many serpents or skinned eels. They are left so suspended until the hot sun has dried them up to a hard, shriveled substance, when they are declared in an estable state, and, under the name of biltong, constitute the principal food of the Boers.

First, a setting of definitions. Biltong may look the part, but it is definitively not beef jerky. Nor is it the charqui or carne-de-sol of South America or nham in Southeast Asia. Besides all the metaphysical, spiritual and historic differences, the simplest way to describe the contrast is that biltong is marinated with vinegar before being coated in spices and air-dried, while beef jerky is salted or smoked. When properly cured, a pound of biltong offers as much protein as three pounds of meat, and can last untouched for 20 years.

Among South African meats—and there are many—biltong stands apart from droëwors, which is a sort of dried sausage, or boerewors, fresh beef or game sausages seasoned with coriander, clove and other spices.

Since biltong, like sausage, is more a style of preparation than any particular meat, nearly anything can, and has, been converted from living creature to biltong form. You’re more likely than not going to find beef biltong, but there is shark biltong, and chicken, and commercially-grown ostrich biltong.

More classic meats include game meats like kudu and the iconic springbok, which is not just the namesake of the South African rugby team, but also an animal that was so hunted for biltong-conversion that a 1937 law outlawed the sale of springbok biltong in order to prevent the scourge of “biltong jackals” that drove in motor cars throughout the North West Cape, decimating springbok herds for profit.

In my days in South Africa, I ate smoky kudu biltong, thick tuna biltong crusted with black pepper (a revelation from the Neighbourgoods market that came off like a seared tuna entrée that had been perfectly dried in place) and much more pedestrian beef biltong.

Springbok and other game biltong is now more carefully regulated, and unlike abalone, for example, there hasn’t been some great destructive Asian appetite for it. So it remains quiet outside the South African diaspora, but so loved inside it that on my flight back to New York, as on every South African Airways flight, a special announcement was made to remind passengers that biltong is not allowed into the United States.

And yet, at JFK airport, as customs inspectors waved us all through the nothing-to-declare line, they were surely ignoring suitcase after suitcase lined with thick strips of cured contraband. The passengers of South African Airways smuggle biltong not just for love or heritage, but because it is still the food of travelers, as it was for the Boer soldiers in Lady Florence Dixie’s day:

On this they thrive, and in time of war find especially adapted to their requirements. It is light and easy to carry; few wagons corresponding to the commissariat of our Army are wanted; it requires no cooking, so that fires, if undesirable, can be dispensed with, and on this the Boer can live contentedly and flourish, retaining his health and his strength in no way impaired.

For a glimpse of nearly everything we ate in South Africa, check out our 42-dish slideshow

It has the the DNA of a restaurant you’re likely to read about on iPads and smart phones and in the pages of glossy magazine for years to come: a massive open kitchen bathed in the amber glow of gentle lightbulbs, a cocktail program loaded with the twists and tinctures made famous in big-city speakeasies, reservations rare as unicorns.

The other trappings of the hyper-ambitious modern restaurant are there, too: young stagaires from the world over cutting their teeth by mincing shallots and peeling potatoes, a prime location in the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock, a trendy warehouse neighborhood with a racy mix of artists and dope dealers, hipsters and homeless, and a name—The Test Kitchen—that suggests ambition, innovation and a certain brand of boundlessness.

And Luke Dale-Roberts has the type of pedigree you could build a brand around. Born and raised in London, he learned to cook in the kitchens of the masters of continental cuisine before trekking east to work in Singapore, Malaysia, and Tokyo. He landed in South Africa in 2006, brought on as the executive chef of La Colombe, a high-end destination restaurant in the Constantia wine valley. Three years later, La Colombe was named the best restaurant in Africa and the Middle East on the San Pellegrino list of World’s Best Restaurant; shortly after, Dale-Roberts broke off to start The Test Kitchen.

Luke Dale-Roberts in the new space for his restaurant The Pot Luck Club

In a world of increasingly dogmatic culinary canons—hyper locavorism, foraging fanaticism, molecular mastery—Dale-Roberts doesn’t ascribe to any particular edict. “The philosophy is to create dishes with meaning. They need purpose, but without being pretentious.”

In fact, the more you talk to him, the more you begin to miss the idea of eating well without having to taste a chef’s point of view.

Take Dale-Roberts’ thoughts on so-called molecular cuisine:

“I don’t know how to use any of those products. I haven’t gotten around to trying most of them. I did have some xantham and some maltodextrin and just found it has a horrible taste.”

Dale-Roberts on locavorism:

“The whole ‘I picked it within half a minute of where I’m standing’ is all very well, but it’s not me. I’m not into something just for the sake of being into it.”

Dale-Roberts on cooking African food:

“I’m not African, so for me to say I only source African produce and pick wild African things doesn’t make sense. Your food is a reflection of the life you’ve led: For me, a fantastic, childhood in the English countryside, 6 years in asia, and working all over the world. ”

Along with the Test Kitchen, Luke owns and operates the Pot Luck Club, a more casual spot whose riotous popularity has facilitated a move to a splashier space atop a tower jetting out above the Biscuit Mill. “The Test Kitchen is emotional, elliptical. This is more like ‘fuck that’s good, give me another cocktail I’m going to set my hair on fire and run out of the restaurant.’”

And what reasonable person wouldn’t want in on some of that?

Cape Town’s food scene is no doubt heating up, much in part to dudes like Dale-Roberts. These days, it feels very much like the culinary landscape you’d find in a great Western city —a mixture of casual cafes, earnest coffeehouses, ethnic enclaves, and Euro-style fine-dining destinations. Across this extraordinary enigma of a city, you can drop $6 on a flat white and a croissant for breakfast, spend $2 on an electric lamb curry for lunch, and then pony up $100 on a 12-course dinner.

It is the latter which brings the masses clamoring to the doors of the Test Kitchen, and which recently prompted eatout24.com, Africa’s largest food website, to name it the best restaurant in the country. After weeks of wrestling back and forth with phone calls, emails, and in-person visits to lock down a reservation, we arrive with two close Capetonian friends anxious to see if South Africa—land of world-class hotels and sprawling shantytowns, top-flight wineries and bottom-of-the-barrel poverty—is ready to cook with the best restaurants of the world.

A coral reef of cabbage

Cabbage doesn’t feel like a particularly promising start to a meal, but never underestimate a humble vegetable in the hands of a skilled chef. A cross section of raw cabbage sits on the center of the plate like a coral reef, then is dotted with a sea of tastes and textures: chunks of raw tuna, cabbage-infused dashi, horseradish cream, and a dusting of dried cabbage and licorice powders. The effects—crunchy, creamy, salty, sweet—pull you in every direction, and the hit of licorice dust stretches the flavors out like a perfectly plucked base chord.

A rectangle of sea trout comes next, almost kaiseki-like in its minimalist beauty. Its companions on the plate could be an educational poster for the perfect Japanese pantry: dashi, adzuki, mirin, yuzu. “My time in Asia had a huge impact on me,” says Dale-Roberts.

From surf to turf: Curtains of raw aged beef arrive draped over a bed of gorgonzola cream, the richness intensified by a miso-cured quail egg and crunchy shards of parmesan tuile. As with so many of the creations at The Test Kitchen, you can see the Dale-Roberts personal journey playing out on the plate: cream sauce and tuile from Europe, miso and raw beef from the Far East. In many ways, Cape Town feels like the perfect rendezvous point for these disparate ingredients.  

Fat langoustines goosed with foie butter and XO sauce

As I scrape the last streak of miso up with the heel of a ciabatta, I catch a line cook brushing plump langoustines with oil, then placing them under the salamander until they curl like Qs. They arrive as the centerpiece of the next dish, each one perched atop a bed of rice enriched with foie gras and drizzled with XO sauce—as promising a blueprint for deliciousness you’re likely to find anywhere. But the rice turns out to be every bit as dry and forgettable as a boxed pilaf, particularly strange considering the server announced it as a risotto. Still, the langoustine is astoundingly good; I’d take three without the rice, the sauce or the foie and be the happiest guy in the Western Cape.  

Dale-Roberts uses foie like most cooks use olive oil: as a lubricant for rice, an emulsifier for mousse, a poaching medium for proteins. Next it comes caramelized on top of a chawanmushi, a Japanese egg custard spiked here with wild mushrooms and glazed sweetbreads. It has the creamy, squishy, slippery textures so beloved in Eastern cultures; it also has enough sweetness to qualify the dish as a pre-dessert.

Green tea pappardelle with scallops and shellfish broth

In fact, sweetness lurks as the baseline of nearly every dish: in the broth surrounding an island of smoked sweet potato and compressed oyster mushroom; in the jasmine consome that comes along with tea-smoked duck; in the oat milk and honey that anoints little pieces of roast suckling pig. The rare break from the sweetness yield moments of occasional brilliance; a thick tangle of pappardelle made from green tea and bathed in a briny dill-spiked shellfish broth showed an extremely deft hand—elegant and refined, yet as satisfying as a Sunday supper. But as the meal marches on, those moments feel too fleeting for a restaurant of this caliber.

None of it is unpleasant on its own, but in the collective arc of the meal it comes to undermine the delicate compositions the kitchen is aiming for. Most of it has a similar vague Asian flavor—too much mirin, too much miso, too much yuzu. To be sure, Dale-Roberts isn’t the first Western chef to be overly seduced by these exotic ingredients, and in many instances he wields them better than most, but ultimately it’s as if no one in the kitchen had ever sat through the full tasting menu to recognize the inevitable palate fatigue.

When dessert finally does arrive, it feels like overkill, rather than a stemming of the savory tide. We pick at the lemon meringue half-heartedly before the server sweeps our final plates away.

It might be wrong to say this, but the best thing I ate from The Test Kitchen didn’t come during the course of our four-hour meal at the restaurant; it was a potato rosti topped with a poached egg, smoked salmon and hollandaise—a $5 play on eggs Benedict eaten under a blue sky with a stiff Bloody Mary in hand. Dale-Roberts’ team serves this magnificent creation on Saturdays at the Neighbourgoods market, a beautiful collision of sparkling produce, prepared foods, and hungry Capetonians that churns and buckles right outside the Test Kitchen doors.

For many of those Capetonians, this may be as close as they get to Dale-Roberts’ food. At last count, reservations at the Test Kitchen are booked six months out. If I were them, I’d order another round of Bloodys, another crispy potato pancake, and bask in the reflected glory.

A pastes-lines street. All photos: Adriana Barboza

Every Mexican is a foodie, by estadounidense standards, at least. Barring French, fusion, or the latest foreign cuisine (Arab restaurants seem to be making popular headway), the best food in the country is available to all income levels, served on the street. Mexicans love to talk about food, recommending this or that tianguis, swearing allegiance to regional dishes that have become national emblems: Oaxacan mole or Yucatecan cochinita pibil.

The is the story of the emblem-dish of the small desert-and-forest state of Hidalgo, which lies about an hour and a half outside Mexico City, at an even higher altitude than the capital (Real del Monte lies 10,000 feet above sea level and is the highest town in the country). Its tidy, palm-studded capital, Pachuca, anchors a scattering of smaller municipios making up the rest of the state. There were gold and silver mines here from almost the day the first Spaniards arrived—Real del Monte’s true name is Mineral del Monte—and they operated, with only brief interruptions at hundred-year intervals for wars of Independence and Revolution, until the last one closed in 2004.

Those mines are what first brought the Cornish to Hidalgo. In 1825 an expedition of sixty men left from Falmouth, Cornwall, in the far southwestern tip of England, for Mexico, with 1500 tons of mining equipment, set on reviving the abandoned mines around of Pachuca. Half of them died of yellow fever along the way, but at the end of a fourteen-month journey, they arrived at Real del Monte. They stayed there for most of a century, until the decade of instability around the Mexican Revolution drove their descendants away.

As they fled, however, they left a fair amount of their culture behind. Notice the tidiness of Pachuca, and the peculiar attention to residential gardening. Yes, there are trees and shrubbery throughout all parts of Mexico, often guarded against dog urine with a barrier of plastic water bottles (the animals shy from their reflection). But in Pachuca there are roses. Little lawns. Parts of the city look not at all unlike areas of West Los Angeles.

Notice the red pitched roofs, another Cornish import, as you make the windy twenty-minute journey uphill from the semi-desert of Pachuca to the high forest of Real del Monte.

When the tin mines of Cornwall began to peter out at the end of the 18th century, men skilled in the difficult practice of hard rock mining fled in droves, looking for work. An estimated quarter-million Cornish immigrated throughout the British Commonwealth, as well as to Mexico and Brazil, in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was these far-flung brothers and fathers of Cornwall who first brought the idea of remittance pay, now a staple of Mexican economy that arrives from Mexican laborers in the U.S. The Cornish sent money home, but they dug into Mexico, intermarried, established their Methodist religion in a country that up to then had been strictly Catholic, and were buried in the Panteón de los Ingléses, feet pointed east—facing home.

The Cornish will tell you they introduced Mexicans—and many other countries—to wrestling, rugby, tennis, chess, and even the only sport that really matters in Mexico now: soccer. Atletico de Pachuca was Mexico’s first fútbol club, founded in 1902. I had to learn that part from the Internet, though, because I don’t really care about sports. What fascinates me most about Hidalgo and its immigrant past is something you find everywhere on the streets of Pachuca and Real del Monte: the Cornish pasty. Two hours from where 24 million Mexicans make and eat more tacos than anywhere else on the planet, you can scarcely find a taco. But there can be up to five pastes spots on a single block. It’s pastes, pastes, pastes (that’s the Mexican spelling) everywhere you look.

First order of business: a Cornish pasty is not just a cold-weather empanada. Yes, it’s a stuffed pastry like empanadas are, but pastes have their own crimping and filling conventions, and their own type of dough. They’re different enough that lots of pastes shops have both pastes and empanadas listed on the menu.

Pasty fillings divide into savory and sweet: fibrous, stewy tinga de pollo and beans-and-chorizo seem to be the most popular meal selections, with hearty potato and onion a close runner-up, while dessert or breakfast sweet pastes come with pineapple, apple, creamy nuez (a sweet nut butter) or arroz con crema. People in Real del Monte and Pachuca, where the highway is lined with mom-and-pop pastes shops as well as corporatized fast-food-style chains like Pastes Kiko’s, seem like they could survive on these baked goods alone.

It’s really not so strange. Foreigners think of Mexico as a hot country, but just as often the mountains are cool, and at the high altitude, summer tropical storms aren’t sultry. They’re as cold as a Cornwall early spring. The day my girlfriend and I arrived, we were madly underdressed and had to impulse-buy flap caps and, in a great humiliation to us capitalinos, tourist-corny jergas (the rough, hooded sweatshirts your cousin might have come back from Tijuana in). At sundown, as we returned to the centro, it started to rain. I had eaten my first Cornish pasty when I was an expat teenager in Buckinghamshire twenty-five years ago, but I still knew exactly what it was for. No matter that the filling is Mexican chicken in red sauce; the feeling of refuge, of a warm pastry to fend off a chilling rain, that is as English as, well… you know the rest.

Grant Cogswell is the author of The Dream of the Cold War: Poems 1998-2008 (Publication Studio), the subject of director Stephen Gyllenhaal’s most recent film Grassroots, and founder and proprietor of Under the Volcano Books in Mexico City, where he lives.

Almaz Dama, kitchen queen of Virginia’s little Ethiopia

Tucked in the shadows of the Pentagon, somewhere between Arlington and Falls Church on Columbia Pike, lies a little piece of Ethiopia. You might call it the Dama complex: the Dama Pastry & Cafe includes a coffee shop where women pull thick shots of espresso for a fleet of African cab drivers; a bakery where the soup comes with a side of politics and plenty of opinion; and a deeply-loved restaurant, where spicy beef tartar and slow-simmered vegetables help bridge the distance between two countries for a dining room full of immigrants.

Ethiopian immigrants first settled in Northern Virginia after the revolution in 1974, a coup that overthrew the monarchy and led to the establishment of the Derg, leading to years of bloody civil war. Including the descendants of Ethiopian-born migrants, there are some 460,000 ethnic Ethiopians living in the United States, and about 350,000 of those reside in Washington, D.C. and northern Virginia. Travel guides and food TV shows have nodded at this community, but they’ve mostly stuck to the obvious bistro-like, tablecloth, sit-down joints that serve the most emblematic exports of Ethiopian food, like kitfu and injera. For the real, informal heart of Ethiopian culture, skip those and follow the cabs.

Split Peas and Refugees
The cabs will lead you to the parking lot of Dama Pastry & Restaurant where taxis of all sizes and colors, from yellow and black sedans to blue mini vans, squeeze in alongside each other. Find a spot if you can, then squeeze through the small crowd that has gathered outside the doors, conversing over a post-meal smoke or debating last night’s soccer match.

Get inside and start things off with the kitfo—minced beef tartar with spiced butter, served with homemade cheese called ayib—along with awaze tibs, a dish of cubed beef laced with onions and peppers and lashed with a slew of spices and awaze, a hot chili paste. Ethiopians cherish their raw beef dishes, usually minced or in thick slabs with generous layers of fat intact. To balance out the meat, add on the vegetarian combo, which includes red lentil puree, yellow split peas, ground roasted split peas and collard greens.

A little bit of everything from Dama Pastry & Restaurant

The platter arrives. The colors astound. Ruby red beef from the fiery awaze, shades of sunset orange, cornfield yellow from the lentils and peas, and sprinkles of pearl white from the ayib. Sharing, an important part of Ethiopian culture, is built in to the dish. The food is all laid out on a bed of injera—a spongy traditional bread— so that family and friends alike can dig in with their hands. It’s more akin to an artist’s pallet than a plate of food. The kitfo is a fine mix of meat and spices, and the homemade ayib adds a rich, creamy texture and just the right amount of salt. This is the rhythm of the restaurant: just as you’re mopping up the last lentils, more patrons walk in, mostly in groups, and order their own platters of color on gigantic spreads of injera.

Dama was no instant success. Owner and pastry chef Almaz Dama, along with her sister Yeshi, were students at Howard University when the revolution in Ethiopia broke out in 1974. Some family members safely immigrated to the U.S. as refugees, but many, including brothers and cousins, lost their lives during the uprising and ensuing civil war.

“Life was not easy,” says Almaz. “We studied during the day and worked odd jobs at night – as maids, bussers, waiters, and bartenders. Everything was different, and we had to adjust to survive.”

For those that came to the U.S. as refugees after the start of the revolution, the road to settlement was smoother, as permanent resident status was easier to obtain. On the contrary, for international students like Almaz and Yeshi, who were residing in the U.S. with student visas before the revolution, jobs and permanent status were hard to come by. After years of saving, the siblings first opened a restaurant in 1983, a small cafe inside the Veteran’s building in D.C., but the establishment struggled financially and closed four years later. After that, everyone went their own ways, until Almaz’s younger sister Kelem opened Dama Pastry & Restaurant in 2000 at its current location on Columbia Drive.

The late Dama Nademo, the family patriarch and Almaz’s father, was a respected businessman and humanitarian in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia. Among other things, he was revered for leading many Gurage tribe members out to the cities and providing them with good-paying jobs and educational opportunities. “When my father passed away, my uncle opened a restaurant in Ethiopia by the name of Dama, in honor of my father,” says Almaz. “That restaurant was a success. So when we opened our own Dama here in Virginia, the Ethiopian immigrants were already familiar with the name and became regulars.”

So it’s not just about food. It’s about history, culture, survival, revival. For a sense of the political salon that is Dama, head just next door to Dama Bakery for a cappuccino.

Cabbies fuel up on soup and politics

Fried Fish and Buttered Coffee
A 20-inch television hangs on the back wall of the Dama Bakery, flashing images of billowing smoke columns, mountains of crumpled concrete in Gaza. You don’t need to understand Ethiopian to figure out what the cafe patrons are talking about: Heads swivel back and forth as animated voices fight to be heard. Bread and spoons in hand, the conversation this early afternoon is all Gaza.

No written menu and no tablecloth. That’s how it’s been for the past decade at Dama Bakery, the lesser-known (and less traditional) extension of the Dama Pastry & Restaurant. No matter: as so as you choose a table and take your coat off, the friendly Almaz Dama will greet you with her flashing smile. Fresh fish is today’s menu: pan-fried salmon or tilapia, or perhaps Alamaz’s famous fish cutlet. A moment of indecision and then she offers: “The fish cutlet is good, you’ll like it.” The lady has spoken. Cutlet it is.

First comes the vegetable soup, simple yet soothing in the way that onions, carrots and garlic that have been simmering for hours can be. There’s a strong kick from the fresh black pepper, and eaten together with wholesome flat bread, the soup is an excellent meal in itself.

Aymala’s famous fish cutlet

Then comes the cutlet. Fresh tilapia fillet, crusted with a generous layer of bread crumbs, fried to a crispy, golden hue—perfection. No tartar sauce, Tabasco or Sriracha needed. Just a dash of lemon across the still-steaming fillet, and it’s all light, moist, and fresh. The sides of steamed carrots and string beans, steamed yellow rice, and lightly seasoned chopped collard greens surround the fillet in generous portions. Pretty incredible for working man’s fare, a cabbie’s lunch.

A group of four or five cab drivers enter jovially, exchanging hugs and kisses with Almaz and the waitstaff. They pull together a couple round tables in the corner of the dining room, chatting lively—again, about the Gaza shelling—as they await their food. Even for the solo eaters, it feels like a holiday family gathering.

“The cab drivers want to eat healthier, lighter meals. So they often come here, enjoy the food, and have a good time, relaxing before heading back out again,” says Almaz.

“Driving and sitting all day makes it hard to digest heavier food,” says Yiheyis, a cab driver who immigrated here in 2004. His plate is full of flatbread and stir-fried tofu. “Some cabbie friends do go next door when they want Ethiopian food, but some of us prefer the lighter dishes here.”

After lunch, Yiheyis and his friend Teshome head over next door to Dama Café for coffee. Lattes are their drink of choice, but you might find, like I did, that the double-shot espresso is a more a perfect match with Almaz’s delicate Italian rum cake. “Macchiatos are most popular in coffee shops in Ethiopia,” says Teshome, a cabbie who immigrated to the U.S. in 2001. “But in our homes, we drink black coffee, three times a day, straight out of a jebena.” Italian specialties like macchiatos and cakes were embedded in Ethiopian cuisine since Italy’s occupation of the country in the 1930s, but the Ethiopians have made coffee and cake into their own ritual. It is now an integral part of their daily routine.

A caffeine kick before the long shift ahead

Dama’s cakes are sprinkled with magic pixie dust—feathery bites of flour and sugar, knock-out punches of vanilla and rum. Baking runs in the family, as Almaz’s father, Dama Nademo, used to bake for the Ethiopian Air Force. Almaz grew up smelling fresh cakes and pastries in the family-run bakery, as she spent countless hours there as a child. Her pastry passion continued here, as she studied under Chef Mesnier Ronald, a White House executive pastry chef, while at L’Academie de Cuisine.

“Coffee plays a huge role in our culture,” says Teshome. “Ethiopia has some of the best beans in the world, and everything we drink there is fresh and organic. During the holidays, or when we entertain guests, we prepare a special black coffee with organic butter.”

[Note: do not try this at home! Teshome warns that regular American supermarket butter would just ruin the coffee]

Asked why he returns to Dama, Yiheyis puts it simply: “We feel at home.” Just as Dama Nademo had provided refuge and hope in Debre Zeit all those years ago, Almaz and her siblings are doing just that, right here in the heart of Northern Virginia.

Sung Chang is a DC-based lawyer and sometimes ruthless eater of offal. He blogs at I Am Not a Lawyer.