African Food: Ethiopian

In this week's edition of Ethnic Roulette we decided to do Ethiopian food, because well we had no idea what African food was. So the only way to remedy this was to go and get African food. We decided on Ethiopian because it is, apparently everywhere in Toronto. I can think of no less than five different Ethiopian restaurants, without having been to any of them.

Now without further ado let us discuss the adventure. A TTC day pass is your friend, your best friend if you are traveling with a partner (In the gay sense or otherwise) because it allows two people to ride as much as you want for 10 dollars. Five tokens cost you 12.50, so as long as you ride somewhere and back with your friend its worth it. If you are like us you get one and start making unnecessary trips. That place is only a ten minute walk? Day Pass! You don't need to go to the park but might want to? Day Pass! You get the idea.

I feel like I just got sidetracked... oh right. So we went to get Ethiopian food and needed to take the subway there. So we got out at the station and saw a long line of bikes.
This line of bikes went by us for at least 20 minutes. We gave it a Fermi estimate of about 500 to 700 bikes. Haven't found the actual count yet. So I'm going to go with I'm correct. It was tricky crossing the road but we managed. The bike cops were fond of yelling "tighten the gap" at the bikers and the bikers were fond of doing nothing when they yelled that. I'm not sure what they hoped to accomplish. I'm assuming yelling that just made them feel less useless.

So we were originally going to go to a restaurant called Queen of Sheba. It was closed or appeared to be closed. So we went down the street to the other Ethiopian place Lalibela (I told you they were everywhere). The service was nonexistent when we arrived and (according to John, I think he is crazy or hard of hearing) really quiet. Once we were served the food came quickly.

So Ethiopian food is served on these giant flat breads called injera. They are porous and stetchy and kind of feel like skin. They are also slightly sour tasting.
We ordered a platter of vegetable and meat options. What exactly each of them were, I couldn't tell you not because I'm being an ass but because I don't know. But here is a picture and you can make your own guesses. There were lentils, potatoes and cabbage, meat, beets, salad, and a chicken leg. The lentils were surprisingly tasty and different from each other (see yellow and red blobs). The beef (or was it lamb?) tasted like an Indian curry while the chicken was spicy and almost tasted like a barbecue sauce. Overall it was quite tasty and you got a good variety and plus anything with beets can do no wrong (they make you pee pink!) View:
We missed out on getting coffee which is supposed to be extremely good. I don't like coffee so I'm skeptical and my associate didn't want any. We had much TTC adventuring to do so it was probably for the best.