Abay Ethiopian food

It has been many years since I discovered Ethiopian food.  I first encountered it in Philadelphia while at a pre-wedding dinner for a pair of friends.  I would not have chosen to try Ethiopian food on my own, but once I had tried it, I really enjoyed it.  Ever since I've sought out such places to eat whenever I could with little success.  There once was a very nice restaurant in Pittsburgh, Road to Karakash that served a variety of international dishes, one or two of them Ethiopian, but it's now gone and I miss it greatly.  I'm happy to say that I now have a new source of Ethiopian food within about half a mile of me.

There isn't a lot of parking near the restaurant itself, but there is a new Eastside shopping area about a block away.  Though we probably weren't supposed to park there, we did.  It did give us a chance to see some new restaurants being built in Eastside.  We will eventually return to try these, so indirectly Eastside did get some benefit from our parking there!

The interior of the restaurant is modest.  There are traditional Ethiopian wicker tables, but we opted for a more familiar Western table.  The general color scheme revolves around a brick red color, perhaps reminiscent of stone.  The menu informed us that Abay is the name of the Blue Nile river, which has its origin in Ethiopia.  (In fact, I recall another Ethiopian restaurant I once ate at being called Blue Nile.)

Like many Pittsburgh restaurants, Abay has no liquor license.  However, you can have wine or beer with your meal, you just have to bring your own.  Abay's corkage fee is a very reasonable $2.50 ($5 or even $10 is much more common).

I don't know my varieties of Ethiopian food well, so the extensive descriptions of the dishes in the menu were helpful.  Even better was the option to get a combination plate, four different dishes to be shared by the two of us.  We could also have gotten appetizers, but the waitress discouraged us from doing so, saying the main dish would be "pretty filling".  I appreciated the honest advice, and it turned out to be true.  Though our plate looked a bit sparse at first, the meal filled me up more than adequately; I would have been truly stuffed had I ordered anything else.

Abay serves their food the traditional way.  Everything is served on a large platter, almost like a pizza dish.  Atop this is a layer of the unusual injera bread, over which were the actual entrees we ordered.  On the side were two more pieces of injera.  The injera is very thin and spongy, not at all like what you'd think of as bread ordinarily.  Janna likened the look of the bubbles in it look to a slice of lung.  For its odd appearance and texture, though, it's pretty good.  To me it has a slight sourdough taste.  You tear pieces of this bread off and use it to pick up the food; there is no silverware.  At the end of the meal, you can eat the remaining bread that was underneath the food.  This will have soaked up the juices, making it extra flavorful.

The four dishes we chose were kay wat, a spicy beef; kay sir dinich, a mixture of potatoes and beets; doro alitcha, chicken drumsticks with lemon flavoring; and zilzil tibs, another beef dish.  Of these, I liked the zilzil tibs the best.  Its spice was the most exotic and tastiest.  It had a subtle kick that made my mouth catch fire for quite a while even after we'd finished eating.  I didn't find the chicken to have as strong a lemon flavor as I expected, but perhaps it was being overwhelmed by the other more fiery dishes.

I'm very pleased that we have a local Ethiopian restaurant.  It had long been a dream of mine to have one.  We have so many other great places to go now that we probably won't get to Abay as frequently as I might have in years past.  But I'm sure we'll return many times.