Mel Roddy, who was adopted from Ethiopia as a child and grew up in Dublin, opened Gursha, an Ethiopian supper-club pop-up in the city, the Irish Independent’s Katy McGuinness reported in August 2019.
Doro wat served on injera, photographed on January 4, 2020. (Edsel Little / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0) [file photo]
The pop-up ran at the Cloud Café on Dublin’s North Strand. Its name means “mouthful,” and diners ate with injera, the spongy fermented bread, in place of cutlery, McGuinness wrote.
At the center of the shared platter was doro wat, which she described as Ethiopia’s national dish: chicken drumsticks in a berbere sauce with onions, served with hard-boiled eggs. Berbere blends usually include cloves, fenugreek, cumin, coriander, allspice, nutmeg, chilies, garlic and ginger, and a house-made cottage cheese was served to temper the heat, she wrote.
The platter also carried yebeg tibs, strips of marinated lamb with garlic, tomatoes and peppers, and yebeg alicha, lamb with garlic, onions and turmeric. Vegetable dishes included gomen, greens cooked with herbs and garlic; shiro wat, a purée of ground split peas; keysir wat, beetroot and potatoes with ginger; and ater kik alicha, split peas with turmeric.
“In Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, Wednesday and Friday are fasting days, when people consume no animal products, so many of the most popular dishes in Ethiopian cuisine are either vegan or vegetarian,” Roddy said.
Injera is made from teff, a poppy-seed-sized grain native to Ethiopia, which produces 90 percent of the world’s supply, according to the Independent. The batter is fermented for several days, and Roddy hired two Ethiopian cooks, family friend Werke Getachew and Yagerenesh Tadess, known as Mamay, whom he met through the Ethiopian embassy.
Roddy was adopted from Ethiopia in 1995, at age seven, with his sisters Susie and Elsa and grew up in Bayside, County Dublin. He left his job at KBC and traveled to Addis Ababa and the Tigray region, where he has family, before taking a business start-up course, the paper reported.
“There’s an Ethiopian restaurant in every European city bar Dublin,” Roddy said. He said there were only about 1,500 Ethiopians in Ireland, but Ethiopian food topped an All the Food reader poll of the cuisines Irish diners most wanted to see.
Evenings at Gursha ended with a traditional coffee ceremony, in which raw beans are roasted in front of guests and brewed in a jebena. Dinner cost €25 a head on Friday and Saturday evenings, and Roddy said he hoped the pop-up would lead to a permanent restaurant.
Sources: Irish Independent (Katy McGuinness), Irish Independent (Wayback Machine archive)