Genet Mulugeta’s friends were the problem. She had moved to Dallas from Lalibela — a city in northern Ethiopia so old that pilgrims have been walking to it for eight hundred years to see the eleven churches carved from a single mountain of stone — and she had opened a grocery store, and somehow people kept ending up at her house for dinner. They kept eating everything. They kept telling her she needed to open a restaurant.
“They would come to my house and tell me, ‘Why don’t you open a restaurant, why don’t you do this, you could make good money,'” she said. “All that kind of stuff.” Her mother had run a restaurant back in Lalibela. Twenty-one years ago, Mulugeta gave in. Lalibela Restaurant and Bar has been at 9191 Forest Lane in Northeast Dallas ever since, named for the city she left, and the recipes she brought with her have not changed once.
If you have never eaten Ethiopian food, Lalibela is a good first restaurant and a better second one, because the second visit is when you start to understand what you’re looking at. Everything arrives on a single large platter — injera spread across the base, which Mulugeta bakes herself, a sourdough flatbread made from teff flour that is simultaneously the bread, the utensil, and part of the meal. The stews and vegetables and meats are arranged on top of it in separate mounds. You tear pieces of injera and use them to scoop up whatever you want. You eat with your hands. You share the plate. There is no other way to do it, and that is part of the point.
The doro wot is the dish Ethiopia is most known for — chicken braised slowly in berbere, a chili-spice blend, with kibbeh, which is the clarified spiced butter that forms the fat base of most of the cooking here. It is deep and dark and the kind of dish that takes time to make and announces that immediately. The lamb tibs come with jalapeño, onion, and fresh rosemary, and the rosemary is the detail that catches you off guard in the best way.
The veggie platter is the order that tells you the most about the kitchen — misir wat, which is split red lentils in berbere; gomen, collard greens with garlic and ginger; tikil gomen, cabbage and carrots with turmeric; and shiro, a chickpea flour stew that is one of the most quietly satisfying things on the menu. With the injera, it is a complete meal. The honey wine, tej, is brewed from honey and gesho — a shrub that gives it a faint bitter edge not unlike hops — and it is the right drink for the food.
On Sundays from 1 to 3 p.m., Lalibela holds the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony. Call ahead to confirm. Coffee comes from Ethiopia — from the Kaffa region specifically, which is where the word comes from — and the ceremony is the oldest way the country has of drinking it. Green beans are roasted over charcoal at the table. The smoke is part of it. The beans are ground and brewed in a clay pot called a jebena and poured into small handle-less cups. It goes three rounds: abol, then tona, then bereka, each a little weaker, each with its own name and its own significance. In a strip center on Forest Lane in Northeast Dallas, this happens every Sunday afternoon, and it is one of the more specific and unhurried cultural experiences available anywhere in this city.
Her children come in and help. The restaurant closes occasionally for family reasons because it is a family restaurant, which in Mulugeta’s case means exactly that. “It’s a little restaurant, it’s not that big,” she has said. “It’s authentic.” Open daily from 11:30 a.m. to midnight. (972) 792-8442.
