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Sugar high
Limited availability only makes Ethiopian honey wine that much sweeter.
“There are only two indigenous alcoholic drinks in Ethiopia: tej and tella,” says Kevin Swier, co-owner of Ethiopian restaurant Ras Dashen. Tella is familiar to Americans—it’s basically beer. But tej doesn’t have a U.S. counterpart, mainly because we don’t drink a lot of honey wine.
In fact, even if Chicagoans wanted to drink more Ethiopian honey wine—a reasonable desire, since the smooth, sweet quaff provides the perfect antidote to spicy African foods—they’d have a hard time. Despite Chicago’s growing Ethiopian community, retail stores don’t sell tej.
Still, there’s nothing like housemade honey wine, which may be why many Ethiopian spots are making it themselves. African Harambee’s Sisay Abebe used to serve home-brewed tej at his former restaurant, Ethiopian Diamond. And though Swier also serves a brand of tej from California at his restaurant, he says his customers always ask for the stuff his wife makes. “When we run out of it, people taste the bottled stuff and say, ‘This is just not the same.’”
msoni
Thu, Mar 06, at 03:15pm
I don't think that an african asking for beer is a weird thing. I think it's because we don't grow grapes in african and the other thing is that wine is expensive. Beer is cheap even those people who leave in the slams of kenya and eat sukuma wiki can afford a bottle of beer.
msoni
Thu, Mar 06, at 02:49pm
It is such a wonderful thing that at last we have an african restaurant which Africans can go to and enjoy the taste of africa even though the restaurant does serve east african food, it is the pride of africa and and we can all unite under it's roof.
