The New Evolution of Ethiopian and Eritrean Restaurants in the Bay Area

Historically, the Bay Area’s Ethiopian restaurants have provided more than just uber-fresh flavors. The cuisine is also known for its comparatively low price point, generous family-sized portions and down-to-earth simplicity. Almost all of the region’s East African restaurants are small, homey mom-and-pop operations. For the past 40 years, you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find an Ethiopian or Eritrean fine dining establishment or experimental fusion hot spot.

But those long-held expectations are slowly starting to shift. A new generation of East African business owners, entrepreneurs and creatives are taking the reins while upholding the work and legacy they’ve inherited. As their elders pass down knowledge, resources and capital, Americanized millennials — the first generation to be born and raised stateside after their parents immigrated from Ethiopia and Eritrea in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s — are expanding on what their predecessors built. The result? At least in the Bay Area, East African food seems poised to enter its biggest evolutionary moment, as newer, more open-ended approaches to the cuisine now appeal to younger, social media–savvy crowds.

Daniel Aderaw Yeshiwas, a managing partner of Café Colucci and Brundo Spice Company in North Oakland, runs a series of innovative pop-ups in Colucci’s patio: blending Ethiopian spices with flavors from Ghana and the American South. First-generation brothers Benyam and Yonathan Yohannes — whose family opened Asmara, Oakland’s first East African restaurant, in 1985 — recently unveiled a cocktail bar, 51 & Tel, that features modern vegan bites like a burrito-esque “injera-ritto” and boozy drinks inspired by underground Bay Area rap and spiked punch bowls. Meanwhile, an Ethiopian duo based in San Jose has been working on the first automated injera maker, Automitad. The startup boasts “unrivaled efficiency” with a product able to crank out between 1,000 and 1,7000 injeras an hour. Last year, they announced the shipment of their first machine.

“There’s a new wave of Ethiopian entrepreneurs who are taking risks in different fields,” says Guma Fassil, the 37-year-old Ethiopian American who owns the aforementioned Meskie’s. A savvy playmaker and the ambitious only child of Ethiopian immigrants, Fassil would know. He unexpectedly took charge of the Berkeley restaurant in 2019 after his mother, Meski, passed away. She had opened the institutional eatery in 1993, operating it as a community hub until her final days.

Since taking over the restaurant and rebranding it as Meskie’s, Fassil has learned to inject his own worldview and expertise into the Bay’s vibrant East African scene. Fassil — who worked at his mom’s restaurant throughout his twenties while also making a name for himself in Bay Area nightlife — opened his own splashy, Ethiopian-inspired establishment in San Francisco earlier this year: Meski. In his telling, it’s an Ethiopian-nightclub-meets-dining-lounge concept with an Afro-Latino punch, occupying prime real estate in the glamorous Lower Nob Hill neighborhood. This new place to be seen at is co-owned by Golden State Warriors star Draymond Green, and the kitchen’s Ethiopian-Dominican menu is overseen by Top Chef alum Nelson German, the Oakland-based Dominican cuisinier behind Sobre Mesa and alaMar.

“I love traditional mom and pop Ethiopian food. I was raised on it,” Fassil says. “But I honestly had no interest in replicating that. I wanted to be a vanguard in creating something that hasn’t been done before, and changing the narrative on East African cuisine. We are capable of packaging our culture in an elevated way. There is an appetite for this.”

Ethiopia is Africa’s oldest independent nation — a millenia-old society, and the first and only African country that successfully resisted European occupation. So it makes sense that its diasporic foods would also have a proudly unchanging quality.

The ’80s and ’90s brought a slew of East African businesses to the Bay after an initial wave of Ethiopian immigrants, refugees and dreamers first reached America beginning in the late ’70s. Many — including Fassil’s and Yeshiwas’ parents — came on student visas, initially landing in states like Ohio and Massachusetts before graduating and migrating westward. Others fled from the drought, government-induced famines, and a 17-year civil war that took hundreds of thousands of East African lives after Haile Selassie was overthrown in the 1974 Ethiopian coup. In Northern California, this led to a flourishing ecosystem of Ethiopian and Eritrean community leaders, including future restaurateurs. Their hard-earned resolve, scrappy resourcefulness, and memories of their estranged homeland helped forge one of the nation’s most distinct swaths of East African food.

“Bay Area Ethiopians are unique,” says Yeshiwas. “Our take on Ethiopian food here merges with our surroundings. In the Bay, we have the best access to produce and fresh vegetables. Our food is full of greens, hummus, salads. That’s traditional, but it’s not exactly the same in Ethiopia. And if you go to D.C., it’s huge piles of meat. It’s all tasty, but there’s an added emphasis on veganism and vegetarianism [in the Bay].”

Michelin-recognized Café Colucci was founded in 1991 by Fetlework Tefferi, Yeshiwas’ lifelong family friend and nominal aunt. The Oakland staple was preceded by Chibbo in 1985, an Afrocentric after-hours club and East African grill that Tefferi formerly helped to run on University Avenue in Berkeley. During the day, Tefferi dreamed of building her own space. She eventually opened Café Colucci, which was meant to be an Italian-inspired cafe when it debuted. After it became clear that Ethiopian grub was a bigger hit than expected, Tefferi went all in.

Nowadays, Yeshiwas helps run the longstanding business that Tefferi built. He knows Fassil’s family through an Ethiopian church (because, as Fassil says, “every Ethiopian in the Bay knows each other, or knows someone who knows you.”) Similar to Fassil, Yeshiwas stepped into his role at Café Colucci with deep pride and respect, but also with an unfurled sense of possibility.

“Ethiopian food is really hard to make,” says Yeshiwas, who regularly travels to Ethiopia to oversee a spice packaging warehouse in Modjo that was built for his spice company, Brundo. “Taking 2,000 pounds of onions, then cooking that down into a sauce to be made into another sauce to be put on lentils and then selling that for $13 bucks — it worked for our parents trying to survive however they could. But for a group of friends today, it’s like, just making injera, we have two shifts of workers making a thousand daily. It’s a very old-school process, rooted in tradition, but [my generation is] thinking about scale, and we’re living in an ultra-capitalistic society. So how can we preserve the culture and, frankly, be able to run these operations a bit more efficiently?”

Over the past five years, Yeshiwas has used Brundo — an Ethiopian colloquialism that roughly translates into “good food” — to reconnect with his Ethiopian identity and to reimagine Ethiopian heirloom spices and herbs as a premier product with top-end partnerships.

That takes the form of Ethiopian spice chai and black cardamom lattes at Blue Bottle Coffee. It’s berbere-spiced greens at Burdell in Oakland, the nationally recognized soul food restaurant. It’s berbere hummus at Obour. It’s Ethiopian hot chocolate at Coracao. It’s all of the clever pop-ups hosted on Café Colucci’s side patio, which bring in talented young chefs from all different backgrounds and set them loose on Brundo’s full spectrum of East African spices. It’s even Ethiopian-spiced ice cream — something Yeshiwas has his aim set on next.

“I want to have a high quality, presentable Ethiopian product,” he says. “Food systems in the U.S. are difficult [to navigate] and can make it harder, but I want it to be in a lot of other different places. I want to collab in new kinds of ways.”

Fassil has a similar game plan. At the sleek new Meski in San Francisco, eaters will find dining options that they likely won’t find at other Ethiopian-owned businesses: Ethiopian-style sambusas made from island yuca, stuffed with berbere-kissed beef or lentils; tibs de maduro, a Carribeanized spin on the dish made with plantains, inca peppers and salsa afrikana; teff pancakes with coconut cookie crumble and grilled pineapple; and habichuela misir wet, which combines Dominican kidney beans and sofrito with Ethiopian-spiced lentils. Of course there’s also plenty of tej, the classic Ethiopian honey wine, which gets remixed as a bottomless mimosa.

“Right now, the older first-gen Ethiopian Americans are in our thirties; that’s really the entrepreneurial stage of life,” Fassil says. “In your twenties, you’re working and figuring it all out, saving your money. But in your thirties you can take those bigger risks and pursue those endeavors. I’m now in a position to do it. I’ve been dreaming of this my entire life.”

Like Yeshiwas, Fassil credits those who came before him and doesn’t shortchange the labor of those who paved the proverbial way forward. He’s adamant about carrying on his mom’s memory through food. He also namedrops Ethiopian-Swedish chef Marcus Samuelson as an inspiration who encouraged him, via Instagram, to take the leap with his bold approach to Ethiopian cuisine.

“It’s all about timing. And right now, the time is perfect,” Fassil declares. “You can argue that Ethiopian cuisine in the East Bay has become mainstream now, that it’s over-saturated. If you’re near Oakland, you don’t even know where to choose. So I had no interest in opening another traditional spot. I wanted to mix my culture as an American with my nightlife background. We don’t really have that vibe [with Ethiopian food].”

In a way, Fassil is doing both — keeping those old-school East African traditions intact at the original Meskie’s in the East Bay while also carving out his own definition of Ethiopian dining across the bridge at Meski, in a way that still honors his mom’s spirit.

He continues with his entrepreneurial manifesto: “Ethiopian cuisine is at a place where most people around here have tried it. It was in a Simpsons episode, I mean, that’s how you know most people know about it. If I tried to do what I’m doing 10 or more years ago, it may not have had the same reception. But the Bay is ready for a different iteration of Ethiopian food. So many people have already tried the traditional version.”