Good Mojo at Gojo

Five lanes across from Krispy Kreme and the $399 sofa store, next door to the World Famous International Twin Kegs bar, a tiny cinder-block building hosts a revolving repertoire of Ethiopian cuisine. Revolving, that is, because every few years the restaurant changes hands or changes names, while continuing to deliver a menu of East African cuisine. In recent years, the building has housed Lalibela and Addis Ababa restaurants. In March, native Ethiopians Shemsia and Ahmed Maregn took over the nondescript building, overhauled the interior design, painted a mural of a sand-swept desert on the facade—and most importantly, introduced a menu of homemade delights that should transform this often overlooked address into a popular dining destination.

First off, if you are one of the many bereaved fans of the short-lived Bethel Ethiopian near Music Row, welcome to Gojo Ethiopian Cafe. The lunch buffet, laden with about a dozen meat and vegetarian offerings, is a worthy replacement for Bethel's beloved vegetarian-friendly fare. Shemsia, a veteran of restaurants in New York City and Nashville—including a six-year stint in the food and beverage operations at Opryland Hotel—cooks everything from scratch. Most vegetable dishes are prepared with oil in lieu of butter, and of the 27 items on the concise menu, almost half are either salads or vegetarian dishes.

There are two main dining rooms at Gojo, which are newly painted with warm orange tones and adorned with animal skins, photographs of Ethiopian sports teams, and traditional African pottery. Four mesobs (traditional low woven tables) are placed among the standard tables. In the back room, chafing dishes cover a buffet table with an array of stews, sautéed vegetables and piles of spongy injera—traditional Ethiopian flatbread, like oversized crepes, that serves as both culinary complement and dining utensil.

We greedily circled the pans of kik (yellow split peas with ginger, garlic and onion), mesir wat (spicy red lentils flavored with onion, garlic and ginger) and tikil gomen (cabbage flavored with garlic and ginger), filling our paper plates with an assortment of food as vibrant red, green and yellow as an Ethiopian flag.

On one day, the buffet included foul—a thick mash of fava beans studded with diced tomato, raw onions, jalapenos and hard-boiled egg. On another trip, we encountered a duet of sliced beets and potatoes. Prolonged sautéeing had bled the beets of their vibrant fuschia, leaving them a dull purple-gray, but the slow-cooked combination of root vegetables left a sweet finish as it melted across the tongue. We also enjoyed the minchet abish (ground beef infused with turmeric, garlic, ginger and jalapeno) and Shemsia's favorite dish, bozena shiro (cubed beef in chickpea sauce).

"Onion is king in Ethiopian food," Shemsia explains. Whether diced, pureed or sliced, sautéed or raw, onion weaves throughout most dishes. There's also plenty of garlic, ginger and turmeric, a telltale mustardy spice that adds a yellow hue to many of the foods—not to mention a brilliant stain across the paper plates.

The flavors at Gojo lean strongly on berbere and mitmita, traditional blends of peppers and spices that Shemsia gets from Ethiopia. While those flavors underlie many dishes on the buffet, in our experience they were much bolder and hotter in dishes ordered from the menu.

While the buffet affords a chance to explore a lot of dishes, it is worth considering ordering off the menu at Gojo—not only because the spices are more vibrant, but also because the ritual and delivery of the food are so appealing.

On one visit, two of us ordered awaze tibs (cubed beef in hot sauce) and Gojo's signature dish, doro wat (slow-cooked chicken legs served with hard-boiled egg). Ahmed, who works Tuesday through Thursday at Gojo, delivered a large stainless steel tray—about the size of an extra-large pizza pan—lined with a single sheet of injera and dotted with three small mounds of yellow kik, red mesir wat and white ayib (fine white curds of homemade cheese). He then ladled our two generous entrées onto the palette of injera and delivered a basket of the folded bread, whose texture of tiny bubbles recalled fine eyelet.

If you have not dined in an Ethiopian restaurant before, save yourself the embarrassment of asking for silverware. It's not coming. That's just as well, because no fork has ever complemented a meal better than the soft drapes of Shemsia's fresh, sour injera. Simply tear off a swath and use it to scoop up your food.

The tender cubes of beef simmered in awaze pepper paste were tossed with chunks of tomato and long strips of sweet sautéed white onion. Accented with crisp cross-sections of jalapeños, the dish only hints at the intensity of spice that Shemsia uses when cooking for her own appetite. (She munches whole peppers along with her meal.) Still, the piquant medley benefits from a cooling pinch of the sour cheese curds, which Shemsia makes from buttermilk.

The two small drumsticks of the doro wat are marinated in lemon juice and sautéed in butter, sage, cardamom, cumin and other spices and served with a salty sauce flavored with berbere and thickened by onion that has been slow-cooked and pureed. A hard-boiled egg accompanied the chicken, engendering the painfully corny question of—naturally—which to eat first. Truth be told, though, we ignored the egg altogether.