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.

Addis - 6100 Telegraph Ave

Addis had the somewhat interesting presence of a security guard by the front door. Just having been subject to buzzworthiness at Saysetha, we began to seriously wonder about who on earth has previously walked through the doors of the establishments on this stretch of Telegraph.

We apparently passed muster (despite my still-pink mohawk) and were greeted by the security guard, so then walked in without incident.

Being such big fans of Cafe Eritrea d'Afrique, we wondered if we'd like Addis as much. Ethiopian food is almost the same as Eritrean food, but not quite - some of the spicing is slightly different, some of the items are slightly different.

Turns out we really liked Addis. The atmo has a lot on Eritrea d'Afrique - nice partitions that separate diners from one another, low lighting, no linoleum. It actually reminded me of Asmara, which I also really like (and which we really need to review - I've been there, Partner in Chow has not). The service, on the other hand, can be described as casual at best. At one point I actually got up myself to go find a napkin after waiting for about 5 minutes, but then again I felt pretty comfortable doing so. It's a pretty laid-back vibe in there.

What we ordered:

Addis combination explosion, which included your typical vegetarian items (red & yellow mashies, salad, collard-ish greens) as well as a couple meat items (um.. beef?)
Service: don't be in a hurry. Or if you are, let them know and be prepared to snag your own cutlery if necessary.
Atmo: calm, quiet
Crowd: mellow Berkeley folks
Spent: around $30.00
Overall rating: 4 sporks

The atmo helped push Addis into 4-spork land, though Partner in Chow thinks she likes the food at Eritrea d'Afrique better. It's slightly hard to compare because we ordered meat at Addis, and have never done so at Ed'A.

Overall, the injera was great and we ate all our food, so we must have liked it a lot. We'd eat there again.

Cafe Eritrea D'afrique - 4069 Telegraph Avenue

This place is currently holding the title as "Best Find" in our project thus far.

I'd wanted to try this place for a long time. The Partner in Chow wasn't so convinced that she'd like it - we weren't sure if this was Ethiopian food or more West African-style food, and she was still mourning the loss of Blue Nile.

From what we can gather, Ethiopia and Eritrea have similar/idential cuisine - or at least this place would indicate such.

We walked in to find a bunch of Ethiopian or Eritrean men at the bar hanging out. We took this as a good sign.

OK, the bad first: the atmo is lacking, it's true. Tile floors, uninspired takeout-type tables and chairs, and awful lighting. I'm someone very sensitive to lighting - fluorescent lighting in particular - so it's something worth noting.

However: the decor was made up for by our super nice waitress, the menu giving the heartfelt and compelling story of the restaurant (look up "The American Dream" and you pretty much have it), and the food.

Oh, the food. Such good Ethiopian food. Or Eritrean food. Whatever you want to call it, the food is fantastic and it's cheap. The menu warns you that the food is addictive, and we agree. We've already been back twice!

What we ordered (on all 3 trips): Vegetarian platter (for 1 feeds 2 people with a side; for 2 feeds 3), a side of the fava bean thing (it has feta on it)
Service: friendly and eager to answer questions, if not rushed in any way (even when you might be a little rushed)
Atmo: uninspired local Mom 'n Pop
Crowd: Ethiopians/Eritreans and local folks in-the-know
Spent: around $20.00
Overall rating: 4.5 sporks

We'd consider giving this place a 5 if it wasn't for the sterile atmo. But we haven't found better Ethiopian food elsewhere. Asmara wins on decor, but the food here is better.