After Fresenai Afeworki finished reading about his friend’s restaurant on a local newspaper’s website, he immediately sent a text to Tesfahiwot Okube, the owner of EthioEritrea Restaurant, saying, “Hey, have you seen this?” Okube had no idea about the article or how CNN learned about his restaurant.

“At that time, I did not expect that recognition,” Okube said.

Earlier this month, CNN published its list of “20 of the world’s best new restaurants for 2020.” The list includes restaurants from the some of the world’s most food-centric locations, such as London, Paris, Hong Kong and Miami. When CNN writer Chris Dwyer collected restaurants for the list, he reflected on the time he spent in central New York last summer and wanted to shed light on the region’s flourishing restaurant scene by sharing part of Okube’s journey to opening a restaurant.

“I was reading how the dining scene has really taken off upstate in cities like Rochester and Syracuse,” Dwyer said. “So, it was nice to be able to include it alongside bigger international destinations.”

April 13, 2011 is a special day for Okube because it marked his first day in the United States. The seven years prior, Okube lived and worked in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. While at the camp, he ran a cafe, which began his career as a business owner.

“At that time, most of the people in the camp were young people who only came to listen to music because there was no other entertainment,” Okube said.

Ethiopia maintains an open-door asylum policy for refugees, the United Nations Refugee Agency reports, and since 2017, the country has hosted a total of 883,546 refugees. Refugees in Ethiopia mainly come from four neighboring countries: Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Eritrea.

“It is very hard in the refugee camp,” Okube said. “If you are a refugee, you did not have rights to do anything; you cannot go anywhere without permission or a paper.”

In the United States, Okube believes what he needs to live is at his fingertips. Living in Syracuse has offered him the opportunities to study and provide for his family. For six months in 2012, Okube studied at Onondaga Community College, he said, but he withdrew to work to send money back to his family in Eritrea. Eventually, they were able to join him in Syracuse.

However, Okube said there are still some difficulties to operating his restaurant. One such obstacle includes ordering a specific ingredient that is integral to Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine: teff.

“It is very hard to get teff here because it is imported from Ethiopia, but we try our best because it is good food,” said Danait Azmera, a friend of Okube’s and a hostess at the restaurant.

Teff is an indigenous grass in the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea, the land also known as the Horn of Africa.

Teff is an essential ingredient in Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine and is used to make a pancake-like batter that becomes injera. Casey Tissue | Video Editor

Similar to making bread dough, teff is ground into a flour consistency and then fermented with water. While fermenting, it develops its distinct citrusy-sour flavor. The ferment becomes a pancake-like batter that is poured over a flat, hot surface to bake, rise and form injera.

“All cuisines have their staple like rice for Indian cuisine, and for us it is injera,” Afeworki said.

Okube describes injera as a sour and fluffy crepe with many “eyes,” which are air holes that resemble the surface of a sponge. Injera is fragile, but supportive enough to wrap around vegetable or meat stews and carry to one’s mouth.

“The bread (injera) is a little sour, which is very good, and the texture is very nice,” said Yiwei Xu, a customer and Cornell University communications graduate student. “Plus, the flavor of the veggies is really tasty.”

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The injera is served with dishes, such as tibs, which is cubed meat stewed for hours with berbere spice and tesmi, an Ethiopian spiced butter. Customers can sip cinnamon and clove spiced tea during dinner, and coffee boiled in traditional clay pots is offered all day too.

Azmera, who moved to the United States from Eritrea in 2012, says this is the closest she has come to traditional Eritrean food in Syracuse, as the dishes remind her of her childhood.

“Culturally, we eat our plates in a bigger platter, where all the family — the kids, the parents, the grandparents — gather together,” Azmera said. “I think that is the vibe that the restaurant is going for. The way they help the customers is more like a family than a customer.”

Published on February 26, 2020 at 12:28 am

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