Still the one
Simon Osborne
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The beautiful ambiance of Rideau's East African Restaurant
photo: Ben Welland
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The years have been kind to East African Restaurant
East African Restaurant has appeared in this space before, and is a perennial contender in XPress's yearly Best of Ottawa sweepstakes. But with five years gone since our last "official review," I figure it's time to check back, reassess... Okay, okay: I just wanted another taste. Thing is, the Ethiopian cuisine at East African Restaurant is very, very good, certainly deserving of "Best of" accolades. It's a bright light shining deep within the heart of darkest Rideau St. (the area provides something close to dinner theatre, if you're looking out the window). Once safely inside, diners are greeted with warm colours and decorations galore: prints, animal skins, bushy plants and even a fantastic double waterfall feature along the back wall.
Even the food arrives with a flourish, on a platter set inside a woven basket. Right - the food! It's very good. One thing I like about the menu, oddly, is its relatively few options; ordering is easy and I can stick to my favourites. Chicken, lamb and beef are offered in three stew-style dishes apiece, as well as kitfo, the Ethiopian answer to steak tartare. I favour the key wat preparations, which feature the intense, smoky berbere spice blend.
Vegetable dishes are also simple, buttery stews made with lentils or chickpeas, as well as a wonderful cabbage and potato mix. These can and should be ordered together as a "vegetarian combination." The "meat combination" includes all the veggie dishes as well as the berbere beef and doro wat, chicken pieces served
with whole hardboiled egg. Tying everything together as always is injera, the tangy, spongy sourdough flatbread that serves as both the "starch" of the meal and the sole utensil. For the uninitiated, it's hard to describe the experience of eating communally, and with your hands, for the first time. So the restaurant helpfully posts a "how to" sequence complete with photos into the menu. So sweet. Did I mention the reasonable prices?
About the only downside (sigh) is the service, which has been too spotty in my handful of visits to overlook. It's not that the servers are brusque - far from it. It's rather that they often seem to forget what it is they're doing. Wait times - for drinks, for napkins, for the bill - can be painfully long, and having to jog your server's memory of the two dishes you ordered, on a slow night, is just not a good feeling. Other than that, thumbs up.
East African Restaurant
376 Rideau St.
(613) 789-7397
Entrées: $9-$15
