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weird Ethiopian food
Friday, July 5 2024
location: Mulberry Street, Rochester, NY
This morning Gretchen and I drove to Hollycake House in what looked like a small industrial build in East Rochester. Gretchen loves this place for its "cream puffs," though those were not available today. Instead we ordered fancy coffee drinks and fast-food-style sandwiches (I got the chick'n sandwich). The woman checking us out had a slightly bitchy impatient-dork energy that was causing Gretchen to give me the side-eye, but by the end of the order it seemed like Gretchen and her had reached somekind of unspoken understanding. We dined in a huge desolate indoor hallway outside the restaurant while a couple young women were having an intense discussion (I overheard one say that she "was a Christian" back during some recent episode, as if she no longer was). Then a young family with two little kids given to piercing shrieks and sudden tearful meltdowns arrived, and we left soon after that.
Later, Gretchen and I drove out to the George Eastman Museum, which Gretchen (but not I) had been to last summer. We found very few cars (but a mulberry tree with extremely sweet, otherwise-flavorless berries) in the parking area, and the reason for this turned out to be that the museum was unexpectedly closed. All we could do was walk a little around the part of the grounds that is not fenced-off. In a formal garden I found a sundial that was not giving accurate time. But then I found that it could be turned around an axis, so I dutifully set it to the correct time so that the next person looking at it would be amazed.
On the way back to Maryann's house, we stopped at a Mackenzie-Childs store. They're a high-end retailer of pans, teapots, cabinet knobs and such, usually decorated with checkerboard or floral patterns. Back when Gretchen and I were married, her parents gave her a Mackenzie-Childs cake carrier with a checkerboard bottom and a floral-pattern top, and it's gotten heavy use over the years. Gretchen loves that thing and wanted to see what else they sold. There was a nice little older woman running the store, and she showed us a few things while we looked around. Unexpectedly, Mackenzie-Childs sold a fair number of esoteric decorative outdoor "houses" for birds and insects, including one for bees that might trigger someone with trypophobia. We ended up buying a black rubber entrance mat featuring a bee motif for about $80.
Back at Maryann's house, Gretchen set out to walk around the neighborhood while I enjoyed a little me time until dinner.
At dinner time Jasmin and Moore drove over in their electric car to pick Gretchen, me, and Maryann up for a drive out to Natural Oasis, a weird vegan Ethiopian restaurant. There we met the thruple whose names all begin with "A" (so they're often referred to as "the As"). I generally find their wide-open-throttle energy hard to take, but this evening I was in a cheerful mood, so they didn't seem so bad. It also helped that Maryann had brought a couple bottles of wine to dinner (Natural Oasis doesn't have a liquor license) and poured me a generous glass of white. (Gretchen and Jasmin were also partaking, though apparently neither Moore any of the As drink.)
As for the food, it was a weird mix of things from the 20th Century Italian Empire with a focus on Ethiopian things like chickpea and lentil wats. But they also had little vegan pizzas and what seemed to be Ethiopian takes on risotto and gnocchi. Everything on the menu is $5, though the portions are small. So we ordered two of everything on the menu to be shared by everyone but Moore (who wanted to order exclusively Ethiopian dishes). The food was surprisingly good, even the Italian ones, though the little pizzas were perhaps the weakest of the menu items. The biggest food disappointment was probably the injera, which came pre-cut in little triangles, each about the size of a credit card. I much prefer having my own rubbery sheet of injera to tear into pieces appropriate for the moment. There was no way for them to supply pre-cut injera in anything close to the amount that I normally devour when eating Ethiopian food. So overall it was a good food experience, and even Gretchen (who rarely finds Ethiopian food matching her standards) liked it.
As for the conversation, it kept, as Jasmin kept noting, coming around to extremely "vegan" subjects, such as how to prepare various foods, nutritional content, and forms of sweetener. (This wasn't over my head, but Maryann claimed not to understand any of it; she takes even less interest in the preparation of food than I do.) There was also a fair amount of typical lesbian conversation, some of it riffing on something Jasmin had said earlier about "all Robins being lesbians" (she meant that about humans named Robin but then had applied it to the bird nesting over Maryann's back door). Periodically someone like Gretchen would loudly proclaim (because it made sense in the conversation) that she had had sex with some celebrity, and the As (who could see others in the restaurant) claimed that such proclamations were upsetting a family with tweenage kids.
The two "lady As" were obsessed with their Owala-brand travel mugs, which they spent a fair amount of time demonstrating. They particularly wanted to show us the amazing features of the built-in straw, which allows sipping and is able to remove all of the fluid right down to the bottom. The Owala is too bulky for most car cup holders, but they discovered that the holders would hold them if the mugs are turned upside-down, since they're leak proof. But that requires opend and closing them with every sip, something that would be a deal breaker for me. (I'm happy with Yeti-branded travel mugs.)
There ended up being a course of dessert (which I had none of) and extremely sweet chai (which I unfortunately had a cup of). And then we lingered for a long time until Moore made the moves that suggested we should go. What followed was a very long (Gretchen termed it "Jewish") goodbye out in the parking lot. Such goodbyes usually drive me nuts, so it was a little refreshing that the people who seemed to be enjoying it least were Moore and Maryann (both of whom are more like me when it comes to introversion; Jasmin, the lady-As, and Gretchen are all very boisterous and extroverted).
Back at Maryann's house, Gretchen and Maryann had a jolly good time watching British detective shows while I had some down time with my laptop.
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