Blue Nile Restaurant, Birmingham
There is no need to settle for the omnipresent curry on a night out in Birmingham, writes Marion Brennan. The city of every kind of international cuisine includes Ethiopian which is slow-cooked, spicy and very different.
There is no need to settle for the omnipresent curry on a night out in Birmingham,
. The city of every kind of international cuisine includes Ethiopian which is slow-cooked, spicy and very different.
For a start you eat the 'tablecloth' that the dishes are served on. For another, there are no puddings. That's right, no dessert menu, not even ice cream. Shock or what?!
But it's part of what makes the Blue Nile unlike so many other restaurants in the city.
The food here is simple – mainly stews – but the serving of it is a performance.
The Coptic Church, the dominant religious sect in Ethiopia, dictates many of the country's food customs.
There are fast days when meat is banned which has given rise to lots of dishes using lentils, chickpeas, beans and nuts, as well as vegetables.
Food is served on an injera – a large pancake-like flatbread practically as big as the table – which is the staple bread in Ethiopia. But it is nothing like naan or pitta bread, having a spongy texture and a sour taste.
Keen to sample as much of the menu as possible, my eating companion and I shared a combo dish promising at least eight of the mains' choices.
It was brought to the table on a giant platter under a conical wicker cover. Beneath were two beef dishes – one spicier than the other, two cabbage selections – one of them pickled, a couple of lentil stews, two lamb choices, a bean mixture and a cottage cheese dish.
In the middle was a serving of Doro Wot, often referred to as Ethiopia's national dish, which consists of chicken and hard-boiled eggs in a dark spicy paste.
Normally this meal is very hot and peppery but not so the Blue Nile's version. All I can say is that it was not my cup of tea. The Marmite-coloured sauce on a white meat looked wrong and the toasty taste was just strange. The rest of the dishes, however, were good.
Traditionally pieces of injera are torn off and rolled around a portion of food as you might roll a cigarette, although I preferred to eat the mixtures as they came, English style, with a fork. The combo dish comes with a further two injeras each, served on a separate plate.
Overkill for me but everyone else in the room was wolfing them down.
This is a family-friendly restaurant where most, but by no means all, of the customers were Ethiopian or at least East African.
The red walls are covered in national art and wood carvings and the embroidered white cloths on the tables are covered in a clear plastic to keep them clean – a fond reminder of the early days of the balti restaurants in Brum.
The mains are priced between £4-£10, another bonus. Our shared Blue Nile Special was £20.
With no pud to savour, the only other option was the intriguingly named Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony, which involves roasting the coffee beans from scratch and serving the finished product in a brass pot alongside burning incense to ward off evil spirits.
I'm told that Ethiopian running legend Haile Gebrselassie was in town last week to take part in the Birmingham Half Marathon – a few injeras in this one-off city eatery would have been the perfect way to replenish those carbs.
ADDRESS
Blue Nile Restaurant, 28 Great Hampton Street, Birmingham B18 6AA
Telephone: 0121 551 9225
