Eats & Beats: Konjo Ethiopian Restaurant

The following is an excerpt from the audio above:

Steve Chavis: You're serving up Ethiopian, that means vegan?

Yoseph Assefa: So, we have a huge part of our menu that is vegan, but we do serve meat. We have chicken, beef, and lamb options. But our top seller, and most people's favorite item on our menu is, our vegan delight which is just an assortment of a lot of different vegetables.

SC: I found a samosa in the frozen aisle, but this is different. How's yours come alive?

YA: Yes, you can make it in a lot of different ways. Ours is vegetarian at our restaurant. When we expand and have more room, we're going to do a meat option and do a lot of things, but we make that every day. By the way, that's what we do with our food every single day. We can't get it frozen. We can't buy it from Cisco or anything like that. So, we literally have to buy the raw material, the raw vegetables, and cook our vegetables on a daily basis. The same with our Sambuusa. And that's why it's a labor of love, for sure.

Carlos Lando: So, tell me about these Ethiopian style burritos you have on the weekends, and especially the meat ones here. I mean, vegan's great, but "la carne" they say back home - the beef tips and the potatoes, man, what's going on with that?

YA: Definitely, man, and it's funny because it's not something that we grew up with. Burritos are something we learned when we moved to the United States and moved to the west side of Denver. But what makes our Ethiopian style is the meat that we use. What you're talking about, our tips, it's how we prepare our meat is what changes the whole taste of the burrito. So, we cook our meat with garlic, jalapenos, tomatoes and onions, and then we put the secret sauce is the clarified butter that we make ourselves. So, we marinate the meat in that, cook it, and then use our Ethiopian spice called Berbere. That just changes the taste of the meat. And then we mix that with eggs, potatoes, and traditional tortilla - it's out of this world.

CL: Well, you realize he just gave away the secret. He can give you the list. Somebody out there is writing this down. He didn't tell you everything. I know there's still secrets

YA: And it is that I'm telling you, and you can come buy the butter, the clarified butter, at our restaurant or on our website, but that's the secret. You can put it in eggs, you can put it in meat, you can put it in a lot of different things. And it really just changes a lot.

Abi Clark: When you're talking about cooking, you're talking about love at the end of the day. We had the folks from the Taste of Ethiopia Festival, and they were giving us insight into the foods of Ethiopia, and there's a lot of sharing in the culture. Can you talk about maybe what you grew up with and how you bring that into your restaurant?

YA: Definitely, definitely. So, if you just even look at our main staple and our food, it's the injera, right? It's the flatbread that we use with almost every single thing. If you even just look at it, it's a big circle. So, it literally brings a group of people or a family or a group of friends together in a circle to enjoy that meal. So, everything that we make ends up going on top of that injera. So, you have everything, and it is not rude to go across the circle and get something that you want on the other side because it might be meat in front of you. There might be lentils here, there might be cabbage over there. And it's just a very communal process, and we offer it both at our restaurant. You can get it family style, just like what we're talking about. Or you can get it individually since it's a little bit easier to move around with it and take it home.

SC: The way the Ethiopian diet has done things with the lentils and split peas and the curry for your vegetables... It's absolutely unique to East Africa.

YA: It is. I mean, that's my favorite vegetable that we make is our red lentils. I mean, it's incredible. And speaking of the burritos, in the vegan burrito that's the secret sauce that the red lentils go in there and they mix well with the potatoes and rice and spinach. So yeah, we use some incredible spices. We don't really just throw the vegetable on the grill for a couple minutes and get it. Sometimes we do that here in the states where we are kind of just grilling it, just giving it a little bit of color. We really go into the spices. Everything takes about 30 minutes to an hour to cook in the Ethiopian household.

Konjo Ethiopian Food. 5505 W. 20th Avenue Suite# 106 Edgewater, CO 80214, (720) 310-5551.