The capital of my home country, and the location of my new restaurant, Marcus Addis Restaurant & Sky Bar, is both the center of Ethiopia and a core component of our nation’s culture. Restaurants and artistic institutions go hand and hand in Addis. Here, galleries, museums, and markets come together to create a steady, electric rhythm that comes alive in the city’s restaurants and kitchens.
You can taste it in berbere, the gateway to Ethiopian cuisine. The earthen, reddish pepper spice mixture is omnipresent in Addis Ababa’s restaurants and homes. It’s essential in doro wot, a celebratory chicken stew poked with a boiled egg; and in beef tibs, strips and hunks of meat stir-fried with onion and spiced with fenugreek and aromatic berbere. Go in hand-first.
Addis Ababa is also changing. Ethiopia has an incredibly young population, so there’s a vibrancy — and construction — everywhere you look. You’ll find teff, an ancient crop native to the Ethiopian highlands, reinvented as tagliatelle pasta, and kitfo, the nation’s iconic raw meat dish, marinated in inventive spice mixtures. And you now have a true variety between traditional restaurants, street food, and fine dining, when you didn’t have these layers in dining before.
Everywhere you go, you’re walking between the old and new world. There are new things happening in terms of food, podcasts, galleries, museums, and music — and they all intersect. It feels like the country’s capital is just getting started.
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I don’t think you should be in Addis and not go to a place like Kategna. There’s a show up front, and you’re eating traditional Ethiopian food. It’s a cultural experience where there’s dance, there’s music, and there’s all the things you want to see from an Ethiopian restaurant all at once.
Pro tip: There’s always a celebration, like a homecoming, a wedding, or a birthday. It’s very festive.
Cameroon Street, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Open daily from 7 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.
Trattoria Gusto is a little bit more of a Western-style restaurant, where you find a blend of Ethiopian and Italian food. Young chefs are trying to do new things with teff, like create different types of pasta. Maybe they went to school in Ethiopia, and then traveled abroad, and they came back with that added knowledge.
Pro tip: You’ll see people posting on Instagram at Gusto. It’s very cool to see this back and forth between Ethiopian and Western cuisine.
572 Guinea Conakry Street, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Open daily from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
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Markets are the heartbeat of the cities in Africa. They’re shopping malls, so to speak, but with long traditions. There’s an enormous amount of traffic in these places.
Merkato, the biggest outdoor market in the city, is one of the largest markets on the continent. Thousands of people live and work within the space. This is where people truly commerce at.
Going to buy spices here is one of the most exciting things. There are markets for live animals too. Whether you’re buying coffee, berbere, curries, or lentils, the ingredients are laid out in traditional piles that are weighed. And then the bargaining starts.
Merkato is divided into districts. The live animals might be next to the spices, but not next to the cotton or fabric. There is a structure within these markets that an outsider might not see. You have to know what you’re specifically looking for before going, so your taxi driver can drop you off in the right place, but it’s very well-organized within.
Pro tip: Understanding and getting comfortable with bargaining is essential. Don’t stop at the first price that a vendor tells you and walk away. You have to negotiate. Bargaining is part of the shopping experience, and you shouldn’t feel awkward doing it.
Open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily
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At my restaurant, we really meet traditional Ethiopian culture with modern Ethiopian culture. The food is a blend of Ethiopian traditions, my journey in the States, and my journey in Sweden. You can see it in the design too.
Then there’s the things that you can’t see, but will be able to five years from now. We take a lot of pride in working with several schools to train young staff, and there are a lot of young students working in the restaurant. Five to 10 years from now, they’re going to be the foundation of the next generation of modern Ethiopian food and hospitality. We want this to be an experience where you can see all of Ethiopia and you can see where this is heading.
Pro tip: Being on top of the tallest building in East Africa, you have an amazing view. You see the construction. You see it all. It’s a visual experience that begins from getting up there in the elevator.
572 Guinea Conakry Street, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., Monday through Wednesday; 11 a.m. to 2 a.m., Thursday through Saturday; 12 to 5 p.m. and 7 to 11 p.m., Sunday
This article is drawn from an interview. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.
