The Gold Award was created by and named after former L.A. Times Food critic and editor, Jonathan Gold.<\/strong> <\/p>\n
JULY 22, 2022, LOS ANGELES – Injera, cool to the touch, silkier than a tortilla and exploding with hundreds of fermentation bubbles on its spongier side, seems designed by a higher power to absorb the lush, spicy stews created by Genet Agonafer at her Little Ethiopia bistro, Meals by Genet. It is the plate, the fork and the spoon of Ethiopian cuisine.<\/p>\n
Genet drapes a large swath of injera over a serving tray on a recent afternoon at her Fairfax Avenue restaurant and spoons more than a dozen stews, sautes and salads around the perimeter \u2014 a color wheel of red and green lentils, yellow and orange split peas, collard greens, carrots, beets, sauteed beef tibs and tofu tibs, and a good amount of crisp, green Ethiopian salad.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Genet-Agonafer.jpg?resize=780%2C1170&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\n
In the center goes the star of the show, doro wat, the mahogany chicken stew that this paper\u2019s late restaurant critic Jonathan Gold described as \u201ccomplex as a Oaxacan mole, rich as butter, whose flavor seems to cut right to the Ethiopian soul.\u201d Agonafer\u2019s particular version of doro wat, he wrote in 2004, was \u201cas sticky and dense as any French chef\u2019s demiglace, so formidably solid that the chicken \u2026 becomes just another ingredient in the sauce.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sitting in the quiet of Agonafer\u2019s empty dining room earlier this week with an array of her many stews before me, I tear a piece of injera that has been folded like a napkin on a side plate and go straight for the doro wat. Memories of happy meals eaten in this room with Jonathan during the course of our marriage come flooding back. Meals by Genet was always a place to gather friends around a shared feast, trading gossip and laughs and intense debates over politics or movies between bites of Genet Agonafer\u2019s cooking, served in the always-bustling bistro that for years drew hungry eaters to Los Angeles\u2019 Little Ethiopia.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Meals-by-Genet.jpg?resize=780%2C812&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\n
The quality and ambition of the food at Meals by Genet, which helped make the berbere-centered flavors of Ethiopian cooking one of the important pieces of the mosaic that defines Los Angeles cuisine, led me to choose Agonafer as this year\u2019s Gold Award honoree. Jonathan started the award in 2017 \u201cwith the idea,\u201d as he wrote in announcing the first award for Wolfgang Puck, \u201cof honoring culinary excellence and expanding the notion of what Southern California cooking might be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet even beyond her food, Agonafer embodies the spirit of resilience and adaptability that chefs and restaurateurs have had to master in the years since Jonathan\u2019s death in July 2018. With the onset of the pandemic and the closures that followed in March 2020, Agonafer, like countless others, was forced to turn to takeout. The communal, hands-across-the-table nature of Meals by Genet made it impossible to continue.<\/p>\n
But when in-person dining returned, Agonafer reevaluated her life and decided to make a change at the restaurant she has run since 2001. She\u2019d keep the takeout operation for dinner only Thursdays through Sundays, and accept catering work. With the exception of the occasional private dinner at the restaurant, you can no longer share a feast with friends inside the Meals by Genet dining room.<\/p>\n
Unlike so many in the industry who examined the cost of the long hours and stress required of restaurant work and left their jobs or closed their businesses, Agonafer didn\u2019t want to shut down her entire operation. Yet she knew she couldn\u2019t continue as before. Many don\u2019t realize that Meals by Genet means meals made by Genet, alone in the kitchen. Although she has a prep cook, Oscar Canales, who has been with her for four years, there would be no Meals by Genet without Genet.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a lot of stress to absorb.<\/p>\n
Consider the process she describes for making the doro wat. \u201cIt takes days to prepare,\u201d she says. \u201cThe onion takes a day and a half on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n
To the cooked onions, she adds the spices and then must tend the pot for \u201cpractically two days, the whole day till I close.\u201d The following day, she comes in, stirs the pot, then reduces everything into smaller portions. \u201cAnd then!\u201d she says with an exasperated sigh, \u201conce the chicken goes in, the butter goes in, and it only takes four hours. But the process is forever and I have not compromised that. Really, that\u2019s why I always say, \u2018Man created the recipe for Ethiopian food,\u2019\u201d she says, \u201cbecause no woman would cook all these days for one dish.\u201d<\/p>\n
By forgoing in-person dining and reducing hours, Agonafer is taking in a lot less money. But the change has reenergized her. Her customers have adapted as well, grateful that they can still get her cooking through takeout and re-create the shared feast experience in their own homes.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything is just peaceful and easygoing,\u201d she says. \u201cThere is still that stress when the rush happens or when we have events here, but things are going so incredibly well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most of all, she is still dedicated to sharing the best of Ethiopian cuisine with Los Angeles. Meals by Genet may not have been the first Ethiopian restaurant to inhabit the crowded stretch of South Fairfax Avenue officially designated by the Los Angeles City Council in 2002 as Little Ethiopia \u2014 that credit often goes to Rosalind\u2019s \u2014 but Agonafer\u2019s is the most celebrated.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we have six or seven restaurants on the block. They all have tradition and style. From the get-go, I wanted mine to be just like a little bistro,\u201d says Agonafer, who is not a trained chef but learned to cook by watching at home. \u201cMy focus was really on the food, making it as authentic as it could be. My doro wat, my lentils, all the high-maintenance food was going to be as it was in Ethiopia.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is my 23rd year,\u201d she says, \u201cand I\u2019m still doing the same.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BY LAURIE OCHOA Meals by Genet restaurant wins the Los Angeles Times 2022 Gold Award. The Gold Award was created by and named after former L.A. Times Food critic and editor, Jonathan Gold. JULY 22, 2022, LOS ANGELES – Injera, cool to the touch, silkier than a tortilla and exploding with hundreds of fermentation bubbles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":406257,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-406256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ethiopian-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Genet-Agonafer-e1658637494549.jpg?fit=801%2C741&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-1HGw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":406259,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406256\/revisions\/406259"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/406257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}