Ethiopia Food Guide

Ethiopian food is among the few African cuisines that traveled well enough to become familiar abroad, which means many readers will arrive with expectations formed in a diaspora restaurant. Most of them hold. One thing usually does not, and it is worth knowing before you sit down.

The fasting calendar decides the menu

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church observes an extensive fasting calendar, and on fasting days observant households and many restaurants serve no animal products at all. UNESCO records the pattern in passing when it describes the Harari festival of Shuwalid as marking the end of six days of fasting that compensate for omissions during Ramadan; the Christian calendar is more extensive still.

The practical effect is that Ethiopia is one of the easiest countries in Africa to eat well in as a vegan, and that this has nothing to do with catering to visitors. If you arrive expecting meat at every meal you will occasionally be surprised, and the surprise is usually a good one.

One grain

Ethiopia grows teff, a grain cultivated at scale almost nowhere else, and the fermented flatbread made from it is the base of the meal, the plate and the utensil at once. It is worth understanding that as agriculture and not only as cuisine: a national diet built on a crop that is native, drought tolerant and not widely grown elsewhere is a rare thing, and it is part of why Ethiopian food is so unlike anything around it.