Demera Ethiopian Restaurant

User Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Ethiopian Restaurant

A few weeks ago, as I was driving home from Downtown, I passed a sign in a huge familiar script. Said, 'Demera Ethiopian Restaurant'!" .
"I want Ethiopian food," said my wife Christine. "Let's go try the new Ethiopian restaurant on Lawrence and Broadway."

The restaurant was full of people with some dressed modestly in whatever the Ethiopian style, the other professionally dressed, were drinking coffee, tea, wine etc...on their table.

The menu is long - more than 45 different dishes (like, tibs), kitfo (raw chopped beef tossed with spiced butter) a vegetarian platter, and shiro (spicy lentils).

The owner was very attentive, recommending dishes to us at our request and explaining a little about the cuisine. We ordered a Demera Special platter, and the veggie-combo, after reassuring the lady that we could handle the heat of berbere powder.

In fairly short order -- 15-20 minutes or so -- we were presented with a huge platter of food, and an enormous dish of veggie-combo... except there was already veggie-combo on the platter. It was a veritable mountain of food. Collard greens, three kinds of lentils, cabbage and potato stew, green beans, two kinds of salad with tomatoes and chilies, and fit-fit (injera tossed with tomatoes, niter kebbeh and chilies).

It was fantastic. Standouts were the green beans, cooked with onions until they were very nearly singed -- these were so good that my wife ate green beans willingly for the first time in two decades; the collards had something in them (crumbly cheese?) that made it very savoury. The red lentils in the centre of the platter had a smoky, rich, almost mole-like quality to them that just drove me wild. The shiro was fantastic, but I do wish they had used slightly less niter kebbeh -- the extra clarified butter made the dish hard to eat with the injera, which was good, but I would have preferred it more sour. We gave up trying to give gursha* with the shiro, because it wasn't holding together. It was absolutely delicious, just very hard to eat.

The service was quick and gracious, which has not been my experience in Ethiopian restaurants. Injera was refilled without our asking for it, which meant that the waitress was watching out for us. we asked for coffee, and she asked us what kind. We prefer Ethiopian coffee. we made do with a small cup of coffee, which was shockingly strong and very, very hot -- "hot as Hell, black as death, and sweet as love".

The grand total for the whole meal was not more than $35.00

As we talked with our hostess, she said they'd been open for about three weeks and had been OK. I promised that we would be back, because, let's face it, it was GOOD Ethiopian food, and it was a mere ten minutes from home.

They are open Monday - Sunday. Hours are 11 AM to 12 PM, and Friday and Saturday from 11:00am-2:00am. Those of you down here in uptown should go and eat there. If it's your first time eating Ethiopian, you'll be blown away by the flavors; if you're not a novice, you can ask the kitchen to make what you're missing (including things like lamb alitcha).

* Giving gursha is the Ethiopian practice of feeding a loved one at the table. You tear off a bit of injera, scoop up some stew, and place it gently in your loved one's mouth, taking care not to put your fingers actually IN the mouth, since you need to continue eating with it. It slows down the eating process and makes the dinner an occasion.

.Demera Ethiopian Restaurant
4801 W Lawrance Ave, IL 60640

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