The capital of my home country, and the location of my new restaurant, Marcus Addis Restaurant & Sky Bar, is both the center of Ethiopia and a core component of our nation’s culture. Restaurants and artistic institutions go hand and hand in Addis. Here, galleries, museums, and markets come together to create a steady, electric rhythm that comes alive in the city’s restaurants and kitchens. You can taste it in berbere, the gateway to Ethiopian cuisine. The earthen, reddish pepper spice mixture is omnipresent in Addis Ababa’s restaurants and homes. It’s essential in doro wot, a celebratory chicken stew poked with a boiled egg; and in beef tibs, strips and hunks of meat stir-fried with onion and spiced with fenugreek and aromatic berbere. Go in hand-first. Addis Ababa is also changing. Ethiopia has an incredibly young population, so there’s a vibrancy — and construction — everywhere you look. You’ll find teff, an ancient crop native to the Ethiopian highlands, reinvented as tagliatelle pasta, and kitfo, the nation’s iconic raw meat dish, marinated in inventive spice mixtures. And you now have a true variety between traditional restaurants, street food, and fine dining, when you didn’t have these layers in dining before. Everywhere you go, you’re walking between the old and new world. There are new things happening in terms of food, podcasts, galleries, museums, and music — and they all intersect. It feels like the country’s capital is just getting started. Kategna I don’t think you should be in Addis and…
