http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-culture/liverpool-life/2013/03/08/restaurant-review-a-taste-of-africa-at-liverpool-s-selam-cafe-99623-32936485/
Restaurant review: A taste of Africa at Liverpool's Selam Cafe
By Alistair Houghton,The Liverpool Post Mar 8 2013
DON’T eat with your fingers! That’s one of the first things they tell you at school, along with “don't push Nigel off the stage”.
But at Liverpool’s Selam Café, which specialises in Eritrean food, you can do things differently.
Eritrea, a small country in the Horn of Africa that won independence from neighbour and culinary cousin Ethiopia in 1993, has not made a massive gastronomic mark in the UK as yet. Selam is as tucked away as it's possible to be in busy Smithdown Road, in a tiny store near “The Asda”.
But its inauspicious location hides a real treat, and a great chance to get a cheap and delicious taste of an unsung corner of Africa.
My first taste of this type of food came in an Ethiopian restaurant in Brussels, picked for its promise of exotic vegetarian fare for M and me.
What arrived was a large pancake, with several piles of food on top. And there was no cutlery.
The waitress spotted our polite British confusion, and tried to explain. But my rusty schoolboy French was a little too slow for her.
So, without skipping a beat, she tore off a piece of pancake, used it to pick up some spicy sauce, and popped it into my mouth as though she were feeding a child in a highchair. M, it’s fair to say, was even more stunned than me.
But our comic introduction to the hands-on eating style couldn’t overshadow the delicate, spicy richness of the food.
That sour spongy pancake, we discovered later, was called injera. And the spice combination in the “wat” curries we ate came from the distinctive chilli-spice mix, berbere.
So I was thrilled to see Selam Café open its doors, and to discover that its food was more than a match for that Brussels experience. Plus, I was smugly able to tell the server, I knew how to eat with the injera.
This is certainly not a luxurious restaurant. It’s a small, stripped down café, dominated by a bright orange wall and an immense television in one corner.
It’s clearly a community café as much as an eatery – as we were halfway through our meal, three men came in and switched the (silent) television from Middle Eastern soap to the Champions League. But it's friendly and relaxed, and you can take your time over your food.
There’s a full range of meat dishes available on the laminated menus. One day, I’ll have to go back and try the intriguingly-named Derek Tibs, a dish which sounds like a character from a suburban-set 70s sitcom who wasn't important enough to be played by Leonard Rossiter.
There are even a handful of pasta dishes – which makes more sense when you remember that Eritrea was once an Italian colony.
But this time, we went veggie and Eritrean. M ordered the Yetsom Beyeynetu – billed as chickpeas and veg with a mild aromatic sauce – and I asked for the spinach-based Gomen Wot.
But our server immediately pointed out that the Yetsom Beyeynetu actually included a selection of other dishes, including the spinach, so why didn’t we just place a double order of that instead? So we did.
What we got was a couple of whopping great injera pancakes topped with five choices from Selam’s menu.
The Misir Wot, lentils simmered in a “special red spiced sauce”, was a mildly spiced dish, flavoured somewhere between an Indian dhal and a chowder and with the lentils keeping a pleasing bite.
The Fosolia were green beans in a rich sauce, bursting with spicy, almost fruity flavours, and was my star of the platter.
M’s favourite was the Atkelt Alicha, a rich yet mild cabbage and potato curry.
The Gomen Wot, meanwhile, was a dense mound of spinach with onion, garlic, ginger, chilli and a splash of lemon.
We stuck to soft drinks on this visit, though there are bottled lagers and even some “home brewed honey wine” on offer. Maybe next time.
At the end, I had to check with friendly owner Selam just what the names of the dishes were. And she told us that Yetsom Beyeynetu simply refers to a collection of vegetarian dishes – it’ll vary depending on when you visit.
On our first visit last year, we closed with a rich and smoky coffee, with beans freshly roasted for us on a stove in a corner of the room. This time, with time tight, we just headed into the night.
Selam Cafe offers a taste of something completely different. But you shouldn't choose where you eat by its novelty value, you should choose it because it's good. Selam is very good, both for a weekend feast or as an evening alternative to a conventional takeaway. And, as an added bonus, it's a bargain too.
Received on Fri Mar 08 2013 - 10:16:18 EST
