Culinary WHIRLED /

Family Affair


Owner Jamie Wallace sits at a mesob, a small, hand-woven Ethiopian table, built for sharing, with his parents, Lynn and JW.

By Victoria Bradley  |  Photography by Megan Wylie

It’s a cold Tuesday night in Pittsburgh, and the snow outside won’t stop falling — like flakes of instant mashed potatoes sloshing themselves onto the sidewalks. But inside Abay, it’s warm, the tables are candle lit, and the walls are the cozy color of buttered toast.

Sweet server Stevie brings a hot pot of yekemen shai even before she fills my glass with water. I can taste the decaf black tea before I even bring it to my lips; its aromas of cloves and cardamom are so rich and warming that they are almost overwhelming. (I hit it with a little Splenda, and the drink tastes like a graham cracker.)

My starter is chicken sambussa, which is like a hot pocket with a crackly funnel cake shell. The meaty insides are minced and mixed with mitmita, African bird’s eye chili pepper powder. My mouth is on fire after one bite, and I spill a little honey on my plate for dipping. This helps.

Then comes dinner: a color-rich sample platter with little food piles over injera. Injera is the spongy bread that doubles as the plate and the utensils, rolled out under the mounds and ready for the ripping. I pull off a piece and get to pinch-eat my meal.

My first grab is for the doro tibs, spicy and saucy. It’s sort of like eating stew with your fingers — if stew also tasted like a Sunday barbecue.

I’m an instant sucker for the misir wat because it’s the most like the inside of a taco: Red split lentils are simmered in a spicy berbere sauce (a hot mix of chile peppers, ginger, cloves, coriander, allspice, and rue berries). They have the mouthfeel of refried beans.

Ayib be gomen is another favorite: collard greens with Abay’s own housemade creamy cheese. Every bite is buttery. It segues nicely into the gomen besiga, the evening’s beefy fix. These bites are soft and slow-cooked, mixed with kale, peppers, ginger, garlic, and onions.

A fingering of inguday wat is so good that I would have arm wrestled — err, thumb wrestled — for it. Earthy mushrooms nestle next to brown lentils, simmered in more spicy berbere sauce.

The spice, by this point, has me blushing, so I love the cold crunch of raw onions in the butecha. Their chomp hits my back teeth along with a mash-y mix of ground chickpeas and green peppers. I go for even more crunch with azifah, a salad of diced onions and green peppers, but kicked up a notch with the bitter spice of cumin melding with fresh limejuice. Whole brown lentils wed the wet bites in taste utopia. I fantasize about what it would be like spread on a sandwich.

I lick my fingers and thumbs to text owner Jamie Wallace about how good everything is. He fires back a “great!” and I’m wishing he was here to enjoy his own “finger foods.”

Wallace was actually practicing law, first as an associate at Buchanan Ingersoll and then, as in-house counsel at ALCOA, he quit and wanted to open a restaurant.

He had friends from Africa when he went to law school at the University of Pittsburgh, and he even studied in Kenya. Wallace says that in his travels, he found that most cities had two or three Ethiopian restaurants. Pittsburgh needed one.

The restaurateur first became familiar with East Liberty when he signed on to do pro bono legal work for Justin Strong at Shadow Lounge. Wallace has since joined the board of East Liberty Development. But the space that is now Abay used to be a fur retailer.

“My parents thought I was crazy,” Wallace says. “My mom cried when she saw the building.” 

Now, his parents help out: Lynn Wallace manages the restaurant three days a week, and JW, Jamie’s father, is a “shameless promoter of the restaurant.”

“He’s the best marketer we could have ever had,” Jamie says. “He used to work at UPMC as senior director of diversity initiatives. In diversity training sessions, he made sure to mention that his son is the owner of an Ethiopian restaurant.”

I finish my large sampler with kay cir dinish. It has dyed the injera underneath like it’s been smeared with lipstick, thanks to a mound of fresh red beets cubed in the company of potatoes that are especially garlicky, ginger-y, and onion-y.

Stevie produces a steaming dessert: pumpkin sambussa. It’s the same crusty hot pocket that served as my appetizer, this time oozing with gooey pumpkin. An icy ball of vanilla bean ice cream melts into a milky pool around it. I smile at my server. “I get a fork now, right?”

Abay Ethiopian Cuisine, 130 S. Highland Ave., East Liberty. 412.661.9736.

 

Pumpkin Sambussa

If you want...
Something “Italian”: Beans and greens. Kale and peppers and canellini beans are served cold with slow-cooked ginger that burns long — and toasted injera.
 
Something spicy: Doro minchet abish: boneless, skinless chicken breast diced and simmered in a berbere stew.

Something hot: Yirgacheffe coffee, with beans from Ethiopia and a dash of cloves.

To say it right: It’s pronounced “Uh bye.”