Until a little over a year ago, the bright green box of a building at 2804 North Interstate Highway 35 housed one of Austin’s ubiquitous Mexican restaurants. Today, the sign outside the building proudly displays a picture of Africa alongside the proclamation, “Food from the birthplace of humanity.”
The new restaurant here, Aster’s Ethiopian, has done solid business since its grand opening in March 2007, placing it at the forefront of a trend sweeping Austin. All over town, new choices in ethnic cuisine — from Caribbean to Peruvian to Romanian – are gaining a foothold in a market once dominated by old standbys of barbeque and burritos.
“When I first moved here [in 1970] the ethnic choices were Mexican, of course, Chinese and some Italian. But things have exploded over the past few years,” said Virginia Wood, food editor for the Austin Chronicle. Now, she says, “There’s little jewels here and there.”
Those jewels include Asters, a restaurant which, to be fair, has been around in one form or another for years. Aster Kassaye, the restaurant’s proprietor, opened her first Ethiopian restaurant in North Austin in 1991. The place enjoyed a fairly successful run, but she closed it a few years later to spend more time with her family. For a few years she catered and sold her food wholesale to places like Whole Foods and local farmer’s markers.
She reopened her restaurant in Central Austin this year at the behest of fans who, she said, “kept nagging me, to tell you the truth.” Still, Kassaye never expected the overwhelming response this time around.
“We were swamped,” Kassaye said of the grand opening.
Kassaye chalks up the warm welcome to a diversifying population and a more adventurous attitude towards food. “Austin became more international town…I think people have become open-minded,” she said one recent Saturday afternoon, in between stirring vats of lamb stew and waiting on customers in the buzzing dining area.
Aster is right. While non-Texan transplants, many of them accustomed to more ethnic diversity, made Austin their new home during the 1990’s tech boom, the University of Texas concurrently saw a rise in its international student enrollment, many of whom stuck around after school. These groups brought with them an appetite for foods other than Austin’s tradional barbeque and Mexican variations.
It’s a simple equation, Wood says: “The bigger the population gets and the more ethnic variation, the more likely we are to get a lot of interesting ethnic food.”
A native of Nazareth in Ethiopia, Kassaye moved to the United States 30 years ago to join her husband, who was attending college in Kansas. After college, her husband found work in Houston and later accepted a job transfer to Austin, where they moved in 1985.
Kassaye’s grandmother owned a restaurant in Nazareth, and Kassaye grew up helping her in the kitchen. When she finally opened up her own restaurant in Austin, she brought many Austinites their first taste of African cuisine.
Although there is now a significant Ethiopian population in Austin, the community’s patronage alone is not enough to keep Kassaye’s business afloat. Unlike in a larger city like Houston, where many ethnic restaurants can survive by feeding their own community, Austin’s ethnic restaurateurs rely on introducing their cuisine, and culture, to new people.
Influenced by the influx of outsiders, Austinites are slowly becoming more receptive to these new cuisines. Jessica Dupuy, a writer for Texas Monthly who reviewed Aster’s in September, said, “I think a lot of Texans are turning on to the idea that food doesn’t have to be meat and potatoes.”
This isn’t to say that Austinites don’t have requirements for their ethnic cuisine. Says Dupuy, “It has to be authentic and it has to be almost an educational or a learning experience.”
At Aster’s that experience encompasses all five senses, not just taste. Travel posters advertising “Ethiopia: 13 Months of Sunshine” (the Ethiopian calendar has 13 months) and traditional African pottery, paintings, dolls and woven goods decorate the place. Amharic, the official Ethiopian language, can sometimes be overheard spoken by guests and restaurant staff. The smell of exotic spices wafts through the place. When food arrives at the table, patrons eat with their hands, using the sour, spongy injera bread to transport the food to their mouths.
The food itself is a veritable cornucopia of tastes and textures. Specialties include doro wott, Ethiopia’s national dish of slow-cooked chicken simmered in traditional berbere sauce and served with a hard-boiled egg; fasolia wott, a potato, green bean and carrot dish whose cinnamon sweetness is metered with ginger and garlic; and kitfo, chopped beef cooked just a shade past raw and rubbed with mit’mit’a, a serano-pepper-based blend.
When asked what he liked best about his meal, a young diner named Jordan Pierce pointed to a dish of alicha miser — split lentils spiced with ginger and garlic — and replied, “I liked the yellow stuff.”
Although her diners may not be able to identify what they are eating, Kassaye cooks the dishes she grew up with in Ethiopia. She packages them no differently for her Austin customers than she would for those in Addis Ababa. Austin’s restaurant critics agreed that this kind of authenticity is an important factor in an ethnic restaurant’s success here.
“There’s something to be said for restaurateurs who are trying to share something of the culture versus showing off something they’ve picked up at culinary academy,” Dupuy said. Austinites, she claimed, “want a great dining experience without pretense.”
Diners have embraced Aster’s as that kind of place. Sonia Ansari, who ate at Aster’s recently after hearing her friends rave about it, said, “It’s cool because you don’t usually get to eat that food in Austin… I thought it was cool we were able to experience that.”
The cultural experience is an important factor in a restaurant’s novelty appeal, but the success or failure of Austin’s ethnic restaurants may depend more on the same things that determine whether the average pit barbeque place survives or not.
“The main thing is, is the food good and is it a value for what you pay?” asked Mick Van, contributing food editor for the Austin Chronicle. When it comes to Aster’s, he continued, “The answer is yes on both counts…I’ve eaten Ethiopian in New York, Bangkok, DC, LA and San Francisco and hers was as good as any of those.”
http://www.astersethiopian.com
2804 N Interstate Highway 35
Austin, TX 78722
512-469-5966
Open:
Tue-Fri 11:00 a.m.-2:30 p.m.
Tue-Fri 5:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m.
Sat-Sun 11:00 a.m.-9:00 p.m.
