Eritrea - Adulis

Restaurant:  Adulis

Location:  44-46 Brixton Road, London, SW9 6BT

Date of visit:  24 February 2018

Time of visit:  7.30pm

It was back in the hot summer of 2017 when we last visited an actual restaurant on this project - partially due to the countries between Egypt and Eritrea, and partially due to life getting in the way. But Eritrea was one I was looking forward to. I had no doubt we'd have a selection of restaurants to choose from. And I was planning to ask my Eritrean colleague for his favourite restaurant. That was going to be good enough for me.

There are indeed a handful of Eritrean restaurants around London, some specifically Eritrean in nature, and some more broadly offering food from the Horn of Africa. A quick search online shows that the small Adulis chain of restaurants comes up on top. They have three branches, all in South London. And my colleague quickly recommend the Oval branch, which he visits often. I wasn't going to look any further.

He gave me two pieces of advice. Order only one meal each, the bread is very filling. And don't try the wine.

I booked earlier in the week via their website for the coming Saturday evening at 7pm. Unfortunately we were hit by some delays on the journey across London, but a quick courtesy phone call to rearrange our reservation to 7.30pm was well received by the restaurant.

When we arrived, however, I'm not certain we were even down on the reservation book. Giving my name, and checking the book, lasted just a few seconds too long for it to start getting awkward. Rather than make a fuss, the man who greeted us let us proceed into the restaurant and to a table.

Straight away, the first thing you experience - and in large amounts - is the incredible smell. Of red meat and ground spices. A real earthy, grilled, roasted smell. It was more than inviting. If I could buy that in a spray... The restaurant was also really quite large in size, but still cosy. It was almost full, comfortably warm, and well decorated. The lighting was perfect. 

As soon as we were taken to the table, we were handed the menus which differed from the menu on their website only in price, and only ever so slightly. When a restaurant is as busy as this was, it can go two ways. Either the staff are so overworked that service is slow. Or, as they want to make tables available as soon as possible, service is particularly fast. I definitely got a sense of the latter. It wasn't distracting, or unpleasant. But it felt like a thing.

As such, only a few minutes later we were being attended to again, and being asked what we wanted to order. Just as well we had already checked the menu in-depth online!

Elle had a question about the platter for one (she originally wanted us to share a platter for two, but I really wanted one full main dish), regarding what variety of dishes made up the platter. The menu says "Assorted meat dishes selected by our Head Chef." Unfortunately the response from the waiter was no more informative. "It's beef and lamb". That cleared that up...

That's not to say the service was poor, it wasn't at all, but we were looking for just a little more than that! Regardless, Elle took the plunge and ordered the platter, and I went for the beef zighni - "spicy hot beef slowly cooked to blend with the rich combination of spices and chilli". It always makes me laugh when a waiter replies to such an order with "you know that's spicy?". It's funny because a) it says so on the menu, and b) that's exactly why I'm ordering it!

We both ordered our meals with injera, traditional Eritrean bread, rather than rice. To drink, we both ordered a bottle of the Eritrean lager "Asmara", which thankfully they had in stock.

At this point we got to enjoy the environs a little more. It really was a very pleasant restaurant to be in. A very vibrant, but hardly chaotic, atmosphere. Very authentic decor, with large illustrated walls, hanging wooden paintings and other wooden decorative items. Very warm, subtle lighting. During our visit, there was an elderly lady roasting what I believe were coffee beans in a tin pot. Eventually, she would do a lap of honour around the restaurant, with the pot of beans. Shaking the pot, thrusting the pot towards each table of diners for a few seconds with a large, proud smile on her face, before moving on to the next table. I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this was, but it was enjoyable to watch!

We only had to wait around 10 minutes before the food arrived. No beer yet, so we asked again for those. The waiter asked us if we were planning to share. Elle said yes. I got confused and said no. I don't do sharing. Then I looked at the huge plate in front of us and realised what he meant. The entire base of a large silver serving dish was covered with the injera, and Elle's meal was placed on one side of it. My meal was still in a bowl, and once I realised what was actually going on, he emptied the bowl onto the other side of the injera.

It was quite an awesome sight. If you didn't already know what it was, you'd have thought the waiter had just dumped a couple of curries on top of a soft towel! The injera was like nothing else I had ever seen, touched or tasted before. It was amazingly soft. Spongey soft. Like a huge, thick crumpet. But spongier. And softer.

There wasn't a knife, fork or spoon to be seen. The idea, as is traditional, is to rip off a piece of the injera and to use that to scoop up and eat the meat and sauce. This was going to get messy! What didn't help is that we were given no napkins, so we had to ask.

After the initial impressions of the injera mentioned above, the next surprise was that it was quite cold. I imagine this is the way it was supposed to be, but I expected it to be at least a little warm. In any case, we began to attempt this meal. The injera did a fairly good job at being an implement with which to eat, although as the main dishes - particularly mine - were quite saucy and greasy, the bread started to suffer. I wouldn't say it started to go soggy. It was just the tiniest degree away from soggy. I think "sodden" is a better word. The bread was very porous, allowing a whole lot of sauce and grease to become part of it. So it ended up quite sloppy.

But this was simply a practical issue. As for the food itself, my dish was rich, deep in flavour... earthy is the word that came to mind. The ground spices were deep, heavy in flavour, and added a lovely warm spice. After the warning I was given, the spiciness wasn't up with what I was expecting. But it was a decent, long-lasting warmth. There wasn't a huge amount of meat, but the chunks of beef that were present were melt in the mouth soft, not too fatty at all. Reminiscent of a South Asian beef curry, but with a bit more depth.

As for Elle's meal, we ran in to the problem which deterred me from going along with the platter. We didn't really know what it was! There were five, distinct selections of meat with sauce. One was definitely the same as my meal, beef zighni. There was a minced meat dish, a lamb and spinach dish (sigha tibsi ms hamli?), chicken in a yellow creamy sauce (dorho?) and beef and carrot. The five dishes were served side by side, and overall looked to be a slightly smaller portion than mine - but maybe more meat than sauce, unlike my dish. Generally each dish stood out and were all really enjoyable.

The lager, Asmara, was brewed in the Eritrean capital and imported by a British company. And I have to say, it was one of the best imported lagers I've had in quite a while. Real great flavour, very refreshing and quite distinctive. Definitely worth looking out for.

Overall, this was a really good experience. We can forgive the few lapses in attention to detail in the service, as everything else made up for it. The meal was satisfying. Not massively filling, and maybe a little pricey at £33 all in, including the drinks. But the quality was high.

I suppose the main complaint was that the whole experience lasted barely 55 minutes. Absolutely nobody's fault, as such. It's just unfortunate there wasn't really the option to stay a little longer and buy another drink. But I was aware that we were taking up a valuable table in a restaurant which was now almost completely full. And full for good reason.