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Saint Gabriel Café dishes out traditional Ethiopian food from a spotless store-front in Kennington. The star of a meal here is the injera, a spongy savoury-sour pancake that you tear up and use to eat the rest of the food piled on top of it. They first layer an enormous round platter, the size of a manhole cover, with several injera, then dollop each dish on top. Don’t miss the shiro wot, a thick puree of chickpeas that had terrific creeping sneaky heat (though the accompanying salad was a characterless iceberg number with anaemic tomatoes). Succulent lamb riblets still on the bone were also decent.
Service was laid-back to the point of being non-existent. My waiter was yelling into his phone for much of the time, then disappeared altogether up the stairs. But the food was cheap, plentiful and gutsy, with lots of choice, too. One final tip: it’s tucked into a tricky-to-find passageway off Newington Butts – so don’t trust your sat-nav.