http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/phool-for-love/Content?oid=5072526
Be a Phool for Love at Alem's Coffee in Oakland Across from the Temescal
DMV, this spot sets hearts and tongues aflame with spicy Eritrean breakfast
dishes. By Luke Tsai
<
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/ArticleArchives?author=1317672>
_at_theluketsai <
http://twitter.com/#!/theluketsai>
[image: The shihan phool, a traditional Eritrean fava bean dip.]
Andria Lo <
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/ImageArchives?oid=5072527>
The* shihan phool*, a traditional Eritrean fava bean dip.
For many Oaklanders, the city's wealth of Ethiopian and Eritrean food is a
point of civic pride. There is, after all, no shortage of modest
neighborhood restaurants where you can sit down to an *injera*-based feast
fit for a king. But Oakland is also home to an even more workaday class of
East African food business: the Ethiopian/Eritrean coffee shop.
Many of these are indistinguishable from any other kind of coffee shop,
apart from the provenance of the coffee beans and, oftentimes, the
availability of uncommonly good breakfast sandwiches. (The secret, I've
been told, is clarified butter.) Others are more overtly East African in
their offerings, with cobbled-together menus that might list *doro
wot* and *kik
alicha* alongside more Americanized items such as pizza, pancakes, and hot
dogs. (In that sense, they remind me of the old-school Chinese-American
diners where *chow mein* and cheeseburgers might share a plate.)
At Alem's Coffee, the Eritrean-run breakfast-and-lunch spot that sits
directly across the street from the Temescal branch of the Department of
Motor Vehicles, you'll find this kind of hybridized menu. I'd been eying
Alem's for years during occasional trips to the farmers' market held every
Sunday in the DMV parking lot. A recent driver's license mishap (sorry if
I'm over-sharing) was as good an excuse as any to finally cross Claremont
Avenue.
My reward? The first thing I tried — a traditional Eritrean fava bean dip
known as *shihan phool* — was probably the one breakfast dish I enjoyed the
most in 2016.
Some background: In 2000, when namesake Alem Negash and his wife, Nigisty
Eyasu, bought the place, it had been a regular American coffee shop called
Diego's Coffee. Negash explained that he was a truck driver by trade and
had no prior food industry experience, so it made sense to keep things
simple. For its first year or two, Alem's Coffee stuck to coffee-shop
basics — good Ethiopian coffee, but nothing more complicated than hot dogs
and a small selection of sandwiches.
Business wasn't particularly good, though. And so, in an effort to turn
things around, Negash and Eyasu decided to introduce a handful of
traditional Eritrean dishes that might appeal to the local East African
community. The aforementioned *shihan phool* was the first addition and
remains, by far, the restaurant's bestselling item. But over the years, the
menu has slowly expanded and now includes maybe eight or ten
Ethiopian/Eritrean breakfast and lunch staples in addition to a
neighborhood coffee shop's usual array of bagels, muffins, and bagged chips.
For instance, Alem's serves a good version of *kitcha fitfit*, which has
been one of my favorite East African breakfast dishes ever since I was
introduced to it a couple years ago at the Longfellow neighborhood's MLK
Cafe. The dish features a chewy, unleavened, teff-based dough that's seared
in a hot pan until it's cooked through. It's then torn into *spaetzle*-like
pieces, and tossed with *berbere* (Ethiopian/Eritrean dried chili powder)
and spiced clarified butter. Compared to the version at MLK Cafe, the *kitcha
fitfit* at Alem's is saucier, less crispy, and, if you request it that way,
quite a bit spicier. Served with a little tub of yogurt, it makes for a
fiery and delicious morning-carb alternative to your run-of-the-mill toast.
Alem's Coffee also serves Eritrean-style frittata — not really a "frittata"
in the Italian or American sense of the word, but instead a very light egg
scramble with diced onion, tomato, and green bell pepper. The main thing is
that it comes, like many dishes at Alem's Coffee do, with two of the
crusty, oblong French rolls that Eritreans and Ethiopians favor. These
days, I almost never see these outside the context of an East African
restaurant, but they are a delight — crunchy on the outside and perfectly
soft and warm on the inside. You eat the dish with your hands, breaking off
hunks of bread to scoop everything up, and to sop up all the eggy juices.
As enjoyable as most everything on the menu was, I'd be hard-pressed to
ever dine at Alem's Coffee and not order the *shihan phool*. This is the
Eritrean version of a dish, sometimes spelled *foul* or *ful* depending on
the country of origin, that you'll find throughout the Middle East and on
either side of the Red Sea — in Egypt, Yemen, Palestine, and beyond. The
base of the dish is dried fava beans that are slowly simmered and then
crushed or puréed into a hummus-like dip, though the spices,
accompaniments, and desired texture vary from country to country.
Accordingly, an East Bay *ful* crawl might include Pyramids Restaurant's
zesty, vinegar-spiked version, which is specific to the Egyptian city of
Alexandria, and the tomato-intensive Yemenese version at Saha in Berkeley.
(The *Chronicle'*s Jonathan Kauffman recently did a nice round-up of all
the different incarnations available in Oakland alone.)
What sets Eritrean *shihan phool* at Alem's apart is the abundance of fresh
toppings, which are arranged on the bowl like little smears of color in an
abstract painting — the green of the finely chopped jalapeño, the red of
the tomato, and the white of the raw onion and the crumbled feta cheese. If
you ask for it spicy, the *phool* comes dusted with *berbere*, which gives
the dish a pleasant, lingering heat. I love how garlicky and slick with
olive oil the dip was, and how no two bites were exactly the same. It was
the perfect thing to mop up with more of those excellent French rolls at 8
a.m. — or anytime, really.
The *phool*'s deliciousness meant I had to force myself to explore the rest
of the Alem's Coffee menu, which included at least one lunch dish — the
*fata* — that was entirely new to me. This was a kind of Eritrean bread
salad, basically: big hunks of crunchy, chewy French bread tossed in a
fiery, tomato-based, *berbere*-tinged sauce known as *silsi.* You eat the
*fata* with a spoon, ladling on dollops of yogurt, which serves as the
perfect cooling counterpoint.
Like the best of the East Bay's East African coffee shops, Alem's Coffee is
as notable for its community-oriented vibe as it is for its food. Eyasu now
runs the coffee shop's day-to-day operations, and counter service is as
brisk and efficient as it is warm. The coffee, served very strong and hot,
isn't the least bit fussy, and the cozy space *bustles* in a way that very
few of today's self-serious third- or fourth-wave coffee shops do. At any
time of day, you will find groups of young East African men with their eyes
glued to the soccer game on the television, or friends catching up over a
leisurely meal. On a warm day, the trellis-covered front patio is as
pleasant a place to linger as there is in Temescal — preferably with a bowl
of *shihan phool* in hand.
------------------------------
Contact <
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/ContactUs/Page> the author of
this piece, send <letters_at_eastbayexpress.com> a letter to the editor, like
<
http://www.facebook.com/eastbayexpress> us on Facebook, or follow
<
https://twitter.com/#!/EastBayExpress> us on Twitter.
Received on Sat Jan 07 2017 - 20:36:06 EST