Cafe Colucci - 6427 Telegraph Ave

Cafe Colucci seems to be the go-to Ethiopian place in this part of Berkeley/Oakland, and it's easy to see why. What they got right: atmo. So many Ethiopian/Eritrean places are either really dimly lit or just kind of run-down, and this place has a California-meets-Africa vibe that makes it really inviting overall.

I've been here a few times years ago, and this was my first time back since we discovered Cafe Eritrea d'Afrique. Partner in Chow ate here during her mourning period for The Blue Nile, so the first time she ate here she wasn't impressed. This time, we shelved all thoughts of competing or defunct restaurants and just ordered what sounded good.

What we ordered: vegetarian sampler, side of Mitten-Shouro (which the menu claims is "so tasty you will be hooked for life" - good marketing, Colucci)
Service: good - we went in late and it wasn't that busy
Atmo: cool California cafe with African accents
Crowd: hipsters, hill folks, the neighborood
Spent: around $30.00
Overall rating: 4 sporks

One interesting sidenote: some Ethiopian restaurants we've visited have tables of Ethiopian-looking diners. Eritrea d'Afrique and Asmara both seem to have a constant bar crowd, and usually some tables of folks who look like they know their Ethiopian food eating there. Cafe Colucci seems to lack that authentic African diner; perhaps it's the wait. Hmm.

Good rule of thumb: if you walk into an Eritrean/Ethiopian restaurant and it's filled with Eritrean/Ethiopian diners, it's probably a good sign.

While we're going to tie Colucci with Eritrea d'Afrique, Partner in Chow definitely prefers the food at Eritrea d'Afrique. Colucci ties because the atmosphere is so much better, and atmo is an important part of any dining experience. I do love Eritrea d'Afrique, but I am notoriously sensitive to bad lighting - and their lighting and color scheme is just the worst. Fluorescent gray meets white linoleum floors and gray walls and gray tables... ugh. Colucci has good lighting, warm yellow/orange walls and way better furniture.

The real test will be what happens when we're done with this project and just want to go get some Ethiopian food. Hmm.

Cafe Colucci seems to be the go-to Ethiopian place in this part of Berkeley/Oakland, and it's easy to see why. What they got right: atmo. So many Ethiopian/Eritrean places are either really dimly lit or just kind of run-down, and this place has a California-meets-Africa vibe that makes it really inviting overall.

I've been here a few times years ago, and this was my first time back since we discovered Cafe Eritrea d'Afrique. Partner in Chow ate here during her mourning period for The Blue Nile, so the first time she ate here she wasn't impressed. This time, we shelved all thoughts of competing or defunct restaurants and just ordered what sounded good.

What we ordered: vegetarian sampler, side of Mitten-Shouro (which the menu claims is "so tasty you will be hooked for life" - good marketing, Colucci)
Service: good - we went in late and it wasn't that busy
Atmo: cool California cafe with African accents
Crowd: hipsters, hill folks, the neighborood
Spent: around $30.00
Overall rating: 4 sporks

The food here is very good; no complaints. It was hard to avoid the comparisons with Eritrea d'Afrique - the spicing is slightly different, the Mitten-Shouro was a new one for us (dunno if we're hooked for life, but we liked it a lot), but we missed our usual side of fava beans that we have at Eritrea.

One interesting sidenote: some Ethiopian restaurants we've visited have tables of Ethiopian-looking diners. Eritrea d'Afrique and Asmara both seem to have a constant bar crowd, and usually some tables of folks who look like they know their Ethiopian food eating there. Cafe Colucci seems to lack that authentic African diner; perhaps it's the wait. Hmm.

Good rule of thumb: if you walk into an Eritrean/Ethiopian restaurant and it's filled with Eritrean/Ethiopian diners, it's probably a good sign.

While we're going to tie Colucci with Eritrea d'Afrique, Partner in Chow definitely prefers the food at Eritrea d'Afrique. Colucci ties because the atmosphere is so much better and atmo is an important part of any dining experience. I do love Eritrea d'Afrique, but I am notoriously sensitive to bad lighting - and their lighting and color scheme is just the worst. Fluorescent gray meets white linoleum floors and gray walls and gray tables... ugh. Colucci has good lighting, warm yellow/orange walls and way better furniture.

If we could just take the atmo at Colucci and the food at Eritrea, we'd never bother with another Ethiopian place. The real test will be what happens when we're done with this project and just want to go get some Ethiopian food. Hmm.

Ethiopia - 2955 Telegraph Avenue

We really wanted to like this place, but that wasn't in the cards.

Somehow, walking into a restaurant that's almost empty just makes me want to like it even more and so I was determined to look past the fact that the menus were sticky, the partition at our table almost fell on Partner in Chow and was just sort of ghetto-rigged together, and the table was kinda sticky too. This place shall therefore forever be known as "That Sticky Place," and that's just never a good thing for a restaurant. Unless you're a Saltwater Taffy restaurant or something.

The only other table was full of 8 fresh-back-to-school Cal students, which meant that we got to listen to inane college chatter while we waited. And waited. And waited. And this is when That Sticky Place lost its Mom 'n Pop appeal.

We were seated immediately, but it took about 15 minutes to even get water. I'd actually started a Countdown to Meltdown by the time we finally got service, meaning that about 10 minutes in I gave Parnter in Chow an ultimatum: if we didn't get service in 5 minutes or less, we were leaving. And I timed it (thank you, retro gold Timex, for your stopwatch capabilities).

The waitress made it to our table with literally 5 seconds to spare.

So: this didn't start out well at all, but we both love Ethiopian food and I decided to just let it go and enjoy the food - there was one server and it seemed like she was overwhelmed by the large-ish table of college kids, and Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurants in general don't seem to be hallmarked by speedy service.

The waitress assured us that the vegetarian combo for one wasn't enough food for the two of us. Being somewhat familiar with the strange, hunger-defying aspects of injera I was hesitant to believe her, but since she worked there and all we went ahead and ordered basically the entire vegetarian menu.

One bright spot here: you can take a number of dishes and combine them as you'd like for your entree.

What we ordered: vegetarian sambussa, every vegetarian thing on the menu
Service: friendly, but a bit disorganized and very sloooooow
Atmo: sticky - this just doesn't seem like the cleanest place around, and lots of things have seen better days. We do like having the partition between us and other Ethiopian-fan diners, but since ours was wonky and we were facing The Back Side of it (I thought partitions were decorated on both sides, but ours wasn't) it didn't help out too much. It just made me feel like we were forgotten behind a semi-invisible wall that might fall down on PIC's head.

Crowd: What crowd?
Spent: around $25.00
Overall rating: 2 sporks

The sambussa came first. This is a lot like a samosa in Indian food; this one was filled with lentils (I think). The flavor on these was very good and very concentrated, and this would end up being the bright spot of the meal. I'm generally avoid fried food, but I enjoyed the one I ate.

The first thing we noted when the veggie platter came is that we could have easily ordered for one and added a side. Oh, well. The second thing is that the injera was really... dense. And kind of dry. And extra sour. This injera:regular injera was like baguette:sourdough rye. It was the oddest injera we've ever encountered, and while I tried to shelve my preconceived notions of injera I just couldn't quite get over its dryness. On the plus side, there was a LOT of it - and the dogs enjoyed every leftover morsel later on. (They therefore give this place 5 paws up for providing enough food that they got tasty leftovers.)

The food itself was also a bit different than other similar places we've tried, in that everything was just really intensely flavored. Generally this is a good thing; here, the flavors were so concentrated that it became a little much.

With so many other options for Ethiopian food (Cafe Colucci is right down the street), this restaurant is in last place of all the Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurants on Telegraph. Sorry, Sticky Place. Maybe we'll try again someday. Or not.