Assab story

By Paul Reidinger

HONEY WINE IS also known as mead, and mead would be familiar to anyone who's read all or part of the long medieval narrative poem Beowulf. (Presumably this category of up-to-snuff readers would include, or would once have included, American high-school students.) But under the name t'ej, honey wine is also a common drink in Ethiopia, as well as in Eritrea, the Red Sea province that split away from it, in 1993, to become a sovereign state.

Beowulf was not necessarily the likeliest subject for us to be discussing at an Eritrean restaurant – which happened to be Assab, opened in 2002 by Mahteos Yohannes and Mehret Tesfalidet – on a late-summer evening with a pair of teenage girls visiting from Germany. I assumed the Frauleinen had read the poem or at least heard of it; they had not.

"Grendel?" I asked promptingly. "The mead hall?" Said hall, filled with warriors passed out from the binge drinking of mead (what else?), was the site of Grendel's monstrous attack: "from the stretching moors, from the misty hollows, Grendel came creeping, accursed of God," in the unforgettable words of Charles W. Kennedy's 1940 Beowulf translation. The teenagers might not have read Kennedy, but they had heard of Grendel, surely?

But ... apparently not. Anxious shaking of heads, giggles. Needed: change of subject. I borrowed my companion's goblet of honey wine ($4) – a golden and heavy-looking liquid, like fiercely oaked California chardonnay or a Euro dessert wine – and took a tentative sip, expecting to be clubbed with sugar.

"Not bad," I said. Really I meant: not bad at all, pretty good, heavy but not fat, sweet but with a definite seriousness, and not cloying. It reminded me of a good sauternes, a drink to be sipped, not quaffed. One could not imagine getting drunk on it, hall or no hall, Grendel or no Grendel. The goblet made its way around the table, setting off nods of approval as it passed.

It helped, of course, that everyone was already in a good mood, having demolished several sambusas, cylinders of deep-fried dough stuffed either with turmeric ground beef ($2.25) or a notably saccharine blend of green peas, carrots, and peppers ($2). It helped, too, that honey wine's rich, cooling sweetness turned out to be a perfect match for the cavalcade of gregarious spices that give Eritrean food its unmistakable character. Few of the world's cuisines can match the varied vividness of the Eritrean kitchen (south Asian food comes to mind as comparable; Peruvian too), and Assab does Eritrean without a hint of shyness.

If you order an Assab dish marked with an asterisk as spicy, in fact you will be queried by the server as to whether you want the chef to back off a little. Although I like spicy food, it was agreed we would accept "medium" spiciness in deference to more delicate sensibilities elsewhere at the table. This concession eventually redounded to my benefit, for I found even medium-hot kelwa-derho ($9.75) – cubed chicken breast cooked in spiced, clarified butter and jumbled with pickled jalapeño peppers, onions, and tomatoes in a yogurt sauce – to be near incendiary. After some cautious nibbling, we abandoned the jalapeños as out of our league; by the end of the meal, they were all that remained on our huge platter, like spent ammunition casings on a bloody battlefield gone quiet.

One of the joys of Eritrean meals, of course, is that everything is served family style on a suitably sized platter. Another is the finger-food factor, the use of strips of injera to grab blobs of food. Children do this sort of thing quite naturally and end up having their hands slapped, and the injunction against eating with one's fingers persists deep into adult life, until one finds oneself at an Eritrean restaurant, where permission is given and, after a sip or two of honey wine, inhibitions are lowered. (Injera, incidentally, is the pancakelike bread made from teff flour, teff being an ancient grain of the East African highlands. Injera, despite resembling a bolt of sponge cloth, is a yeast-leavened bread, but the leavening produces not so much a rising as a bubbling.)

Other players on our platter included the classic beef dish kelwa ($9.75), which was essentially a red-meat version of the kelwa-derho but suffered slightly, I thought, from tough meat. Also hot, though not quite as scorching as the chicken, was the kantisha ($8.25), slices of mushroom sautéed in clarified butter. And into the mild category fell shiro ($7.75), a heap of golden-brown chickpea purée that looked like an autumnal California hillock as represented in some diorama.

Eritrean restaurants tend to have at least one dish that offers a reminder of India's relative nearness. At Assab this dish is the alicha-beggee ($8.95), cubes of lamb and potato (with shreds of carrot and bell pepper) in a yellowish, even-tempered curry sauce. You would not bat an eye if you were served such a preparation at an Indian or Pakistani restaurant or maybe even a Chinese one, though you would have to forgo the infantile pleasures of eating it with injera and make do, instead, with a grown-up bowl of rice. That would slow, but only a bit, the business of wolfing it down.

Assab. 2845 Geary Blvd. (at Collins), SF. (415) 441-7083. Lunch: Mon.-Sat., 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Dinner: Mon.-Thurs., 4-9:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 4-10 p.m. Beer and wine. American Express, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Somewhat noisy. Wheelchair accessible.