The Sheraton Addis may be in Africa, but its style and its management are decidedly European. You feel the weight of this as soon as Samuelsson walks into the kitchen. He looks not like the head chefs, imported from Europe or Southeast Asia, but like the line cooks and pot washers. They smile with pride when they see him.
Samuelsson makes his wishes known with firm and formal insistence. “Anything you don’t know, just ask me. Let me know before, not after, a mistake is made,” he says. There is much on his still-evolving menu that the line cooks have never heard of. Cucumber juice? White coffee? He rushes from station to station as a chef in an American kitchen would, but that pace is unknown here. “He moves so fast,” one cook says. When he steps away for a moment, several of the cooks taste the white bunna, toasted green coffee beans simmered in coconut milk (a staple in much of Africa), heavy cream, cinnamon, brown sugar, and, from a bottle plucked off Asfaw’s kitchen table, coffee liqueur. Soon, with the aid of a charged siphon, this “white coffee” will add a foamy contrast to velvety chocolate ganache cakes.
“What amazes me is that he is really using Ethiopian tastes,” says Alemayehu Tefera, one of the line cooks. “There are people who make traditional food, but not in this way.”
The evening’s honored guests include doctors, ambassadors, and tourism officials. Samuelsson takes the usual Continental apéritif—a glass of Champagne—a step further, pouring it over Champagne granita and serving it with an amusebouche of smoked trout.
His first course consists of salmon cured in the mixture of chile peppers, ginger, onion, cloves, cinnamon, basil, rue seed, and bishop’s weed that Ethiopians call berbere (pronounced “ber-ber-AY”), then wrapped in injera and served with a cold yogurt soup. “Pairing salmon with a sourdough bread is classic,” Samuelsson notes. “Think of Russian blini.”
And indeed that is the key to Samuelsson’s personal cuisine: his ability to take classic flavors and add to them an extravagant taste of the unexpected. In his next course, he pairs his foie gras ganache with tea-cured duck. He didn’t invent the idea of adding cardamom to the tea—that’s common throughout this part of the world—but the spice adds a smoky richness. It’s served with a honey wine reduction and an onion “jam” in the same seasonings that give a wat its distinctive taste.
For the third course, instead of deconstructing a Western dish and then reassembling it with Ethiopian ingredients, Samuelsson takes spicy Ethiopian grilled lamb and presents it, not as the usual boneless morsels, but as rack of lamb, crusted with berbere. Ethiopians are meat eaters, and this course strikes an audible chord as the first bites are taken.
The meal closes with the chocolate ganache cakes and that ethereal white-coffee foam garnished with crisp, translucent beet chips.
“I’ve always loved the pairing of beets with dessert,” says Samuelsson. “Their natural sweetness compliments the chocolate. And because Ethiopia is where coffee comes from, I thought it would be fun to include some.”
“It’s more than I expected, really,” says Yusuf Abdulahi Suker, the commissioner of tourism. “It was something original, something new. I was completely overwhelmed.”
Samuelsson is glowing the next morning. Encouraged by the conversations he’s had with Suker and Jean-Pierre Manigoff, the general manager of the hotel, he is alive with the thought of establishing a cooking school in Addis Ababa or of creating an internship for Ethiopian chefs in New York. But it has become obvious that he will not pursue questions of his birth and adoption on this trip. Perhaps his schedule is too busy, perhaps his desire to know more about his Ethiopian family is outweighed by ambivalence about what he might discover.
What he talks of in the end is food and the ways in which his personal cuisine has been altered by what he has learned here. “I may not go back tomorrow and cook differently, but I know that every major trip in my life has made me a better chef. And this is the best trip I’ve ever done, spiritually, in every way.
“I would like to inspire not just cooks but everyone,” he continues. “If people are willing to open their minds to the cuisine of Ethiopia, then someday they will be willing to do the same with Ethiopian culture. The best of Ethiopia has global appeal.” Just like Samuelsson’s personal cuisine.
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