Old Patterns

I could wear a hole in a floor with how much I love going to the same places. I don't mean to do it but I like comfort. I don't like to be disappointed and I don't like to disappoint those people who work at my favorite haunts.

I'm talking about my favorite restaurants. We always go to the same places when we go out. For a nice dinner we go to Silverlake and go to Cliff's Edge, for sushi we go to Miyako, for Indian we go to the place by our house, and for Thai we go to Chan Dara which is literally in our alley but for some reason this weekend we put a toe outside of the box.


Drum roll please......We tried Ethopian Food and absolutely loved it! In Los Angeles there is "Little Ethiopia" and its on Fairfax also nicknamed "Ethiopian row". We were driving back from Ikea and wanted something good for dinner but didnt' want any of our usual ( gasp..how could this be?). So we decided to try ethiopian food.

So we used Urban Spoon ( iphone app..love it!) and found, Rahel Ethiopian Vegan Restaurant. It was amazing. We split a millenium special for 2.




This isn't exactly what we had but it comes out like this. Little mounds of stew and served with this spongy pancake that has a slight sourdough flavor. Its actually the brown part under the stews in the above image. The meal also came with a big basket of the spongy part and that is what you ate with. There were no forks, spoons, knives, etc.. ( though an obnoxious table of 10 teenagers did order forks). If you've never had Ethiopian its very similar to Indian as far as texture but different spices. My favorite was a carrot and potato stew and the split pea stew. The perfect compliment to all these spicy stews was a fresh coconut juice. Yum. Over all the experience was really good and it hardly hurt at all to step outside of our comfort zone! The only part that was not so good was the service. There was one waitress for about 15 tables and we had finished eating and waited almost 30 minutes to be able to flag her down for a check. A little disappointing because of service but the food far out weighed that part.

Upon doing a bit of research it appears that Rahel also used to own Messob which is next door to Rahel's restaurant. So maybe our next trip down there we will check out Messob.