Viva Lewes Issue #128 May 2017

FOOD REVIEW
The Feature Kitchen
Addis Ababa in your own back garden
“He said he was from
South Sudan,” says my
mum, down the phone.
“He was a very nice
chap.” And: “There’s
lots of bits. I don’t know
how you’re going to
heat it all up.”
I’m staying the weekend
at her house in
Kingston, but I’m out
and about on Saturday
evening, and she’s been left to collect and pay for
what will be Sunday’s lunch. The ‘bits’ are the
April menu from The Feature Kitchen, a new
takeaway delivery service, run by food author
Jacob Folio Todd, the ‘nice chap’.
It’s an enterprise based in Lewes; Jacob is planning
to invite a series of locally based chefs
from around the world to cook up a menu based
on their cuisine, which will be delivered on
Saturdays. Every month will feature a different
country: in April it’s Ethiopian food, devised by
Genet & Abeba, from Addis Ababa.
When I get home the fridge is packed full of
little labelled Tupperware boxes containing
exotic foodstuff. The labels say things like ‘misir
wat’, and ‘yebigir alicha’ and ‘ye-abesha gomen’.
There’s a little slip of paper with translations, in
this case ‘a rich spicy red lentil sauce flavoured
with Berbere spice mix’, ‘small pieces of lamb
stewed with onions and finished with turmeric’
and ‘braised spring greens with mild green chilli’.
In all there are eight different items, as well as
vast stretches of ‘injera’, translated as ‘Ethiopian
fermented staple, an aerated flatbread’ which is
soft and spongy and rolled into sausage shapes.
Sunday is about as hot as April days can get, so
we opt to eat in
the garden. My
mother – usually
quite adventurous
in her food
tastes – has opted
to have fish and
chips, however
nice the chap was,
so Rowena and I
are left with three
portions to get
through. The microwave comes into its own and
my wife’s eyes grow in anticipation as I bring
steaming dish after steaming dish to the table.
We’ve tried out the Ethiopian restaurant in
Baker Street in Brighton, so we know what to do.
The knife and fork is useful for cutting things
like chicken and hard-boiled egg, but the most
important utensil is the injera, which you use to
grab morsels of food from the various dishes,
to make little parcels. It’s messy, in our inexpert
hands, but it’s fun. My mother looks on for a bit
before opting to return to her book inside.
There’s a cabbagy dish that neither of us take to,
but other than that, everything is delicious. The
doro wat, cooked in a rich, (not overly) piquant
red Berbere sauce - one of the key ingredients to
cooking in this part of East Africa - is outstanding.
The whole process is educational, as well as
extremely tasty. It’s also all rather exciting. I
haven’t a clue what nationality Jacob is planning
to bring to our tables in May, but I’m eager to
find out.
Alex Leith
£12 per person, vegetarian menu also available.
07876655664 / thefeaturekitchen.co.uk /
info@thefeaturekitchen.co.uk
Photo by Rowena Easton
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