Confederacy of a Dunce

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

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One real benefit of London life is the amazing range of restaurants of every possible sort. It can even be depressing, knowing there are too many good restaurants to have any chance of visiting them all. But even in the "low-priced" range¹, there are a lot of really good options. Last night we visited one such place: Zigni House, an Eritrean restaurant on the Essex Road. We arrived fairly early so had the place mostly to ourselves (to be frank, a little cavernous and painfully quiet at the early hour). Although we had the option to order from the menu, how could we avoid the buffet option (£8)? After all this allowed us to avoid the most difficult decisions.

A staple of Eritrean (and Ethiopian) food is injera, a spongy, bubbly, slightly sticky bread. Most of the dishes are stews, served on injera (which soaks up the liquids quite nicely); injera is also the eating utensil (scoop up food with pieces of injera). Meat dishes include various preparations of chicken, lamb and beef, but we targeted the veggie side of the buffet. Heavy on lentils and potatoes, but that's not a bad thing at all as they were served in a great variety of sauces/stews. Unfortunately I didn't note the names of the dishes so the best I can do is to say that my favorites were the orange-colored lentil dish (preferred over the yellow or brown ones), and a spicy potato stew (possibly a veggie zigni). An Eritrean beer (Asmara) was on the menu so I had to try it. A decent lager with a slightly honeyed taste, I wouldn't go out of my way to have it again but certainly cannot complain. Previous reviews have complained about the level of service, but as we went on a very quiet night (the day after a bank holiday Monday) and ate from the buffet, we had no reason to complain.

¹The concept of "low-priced", of course, is relative. London is awfully expensive (expensive enough that we found Tokyo restaurants unexpectedly reasonably-priced on our visit there), so my own notion of "low-priced" might not translate so well. When I say "low-priced", I'm thinking of a bill of about £10 per person (not counting drinks).

consume

Wednesday, May 04, 2005 11:26:45 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)