For the last two years Auckland has been without a standalone Ethiopian eatery. Charlotte Muru-Lanning talks to the owners of a new restaurant that’s filling the gap.

Injera is the spongy, sour flatbread that’s core to Ethiopian cuisine. Made of teff, the tiniest grain in the world, injera is formed into discs to line dining trays over which thick spiced stews are spooned. During the course of the meal, the porous bread is used both as an eating utensil and to soak up juices from the meal.

“Even though it’s food, the word injera can also mean my place, my country, my love,” says Fetehalow Zomo who, alongside business partner and chef Fantaye Aga, recently opened Auckland’s newest (and only) Ethiopian restaurant, Gojo. 

Despite the majority of New Zealand’s Ethiopian population living in Auckland, the city has been without a standalone Ethiopian restaurant since 2020, when Cafe Abyssinia closed after seven years in operation. Zomo and Aga, who met at church, had dreamed of opening a restaurant for years. They’d catered markets, festivals and events, but it was only when they realised the city was without a single Ethiopian restaurant they decided to fill the gap.

Nestled in a quiet street off the main New Lynn drag, Gojo has been brought to life by the co-owners with bold murals, messob (woven tables) and charmingly-retro looking tables and chairs. They chose the area because of its proximity to their own community, and as a bonus, it’s handy for Aga who lives just down the road. 

The pair hope to invoke a sense of home through their food. “I’ve had people who are Ethiopian who have eaten [Aga’s] food and they explain it as if they close their eyes, they feel that they’re back home,” Zomo says. “That’s how amazing she is with her cooking, she’s the boss.”

Aga arrived in New Zealand from Ethiopia, where she’d spent most of her life, in 2012. Her mother, “a beautiful cook”, taught her how to prepare traditional dishes as a young girl. She says she worked in 16 different restaurants in Ethiopia before moving to Auckland.

For Zomo, his relationship with home is more complicated. His family escaped Ethiopia during the civil war, finding their way to a refugee camp in Sudan, where he was born. In 2003, as a 12-year old, he moved with his family to Auckland, where he attended school for the first time and learnt English. Despite calling both New Zealand and Ethiopia home, he’s never been to Ethiopia, the place he describes as his “motherland”.

“I used to have a lot of things against Ethiopia,” he says. “I guess because I didn’t get to experience a lot of things that a lot of kids usually do. I’ve never seen my grandparents, uncles and cousins and things like that, never experienced that.” Now, almost 20 years later, he has plans to visit when he can. “Despite what happened,” he says, “that’s where my roots are, I still have love for the country.” The food of Ethiopia that he grew up eating in his family home has become a vital link to where he’s from. “Expressing the culture within our food, that brings a lot of connection,” he says. 

At Gojo, the menu features injera, of course, along with 14 other staples of Ethiopian cuisine, like doro wat, a chicken stew with a boiled egg hidden within a sauce tinged red by a fiery spice blend called berbere. And gomen besega, a comforting mix of cooked kale, spinach and beef brisket spiked with butter, onions and garlic. Then there’s kitfo, which Zomo says is a dish that “almost every Ethiopian that comes in is looking for”. Kifto is beef mince, either cooked or tartare, infused with homemade butter and a mix of mitmita (an Ethiopian spice blend). While traditionally a dish served only on special occasions, kifto is a regular menu item at Gojo.

The restaurant also offers a number of vegan dishes which are integral to both Ethiopian cuisine and culture. Nearly half of the Ethiopian population are Orthodox Christians who fast on Wednesdays and Fridays – “fasting” in this context meaning not consuming any animal products. Essential dishes like misir wat, a stew of red lentils and tomatoes steeped in spiced butter and berbere, or timatim fitfit, a cooling salad of tomato and green chilli, spices and olive oil piled onto injera are products of this long-standing religious ritual and mainstays of Gojo’s menu.

Authenticity can be a challenge when you’re far from the place where vital ingredients are plentiful. Still, Gojo is dedicated to maintaining Ethiopian culinary traditions. Aga makes everything in house, no matter how time-consuming or difficult. Before the restaurant opens for the evening you can find her hard at work making niter kibbeh, a spice-infused clarified butter used to flavour dishes; ayib, a fresh cottage-cheese style cheese; birb, a honey drink; and keneto, a drink made from barley lemon, orange, cinnamon and honey. Gojo also offers a traditional coffee roasted in house and served by the cup or in a pot called jebena. Leaves from the tena’adam shrub, an aromatic plant grown in the highlands of Ethiopia, are served on the side. Zomo would love to see jebena buna, the customary Ethiopian coffee ritual – it involves the roasting, brewing and (slow) drinking of many cups of coffee while discussing the issues of the day –  become more popular in New Zealand. It’s about “coming together, being present,” Zomo says.

It’s these kinds of details, and the work required to produce them, that underscores the pair’s desire to hold true to the food of their home, and to share that with others. “Ethiopians are proud [and] we love our culture,” says Zomo. “We want people to come in and go OK, this is what Ethiopia looks like, this is what Ethiopia tastes like.”

Gojo Ethiopian Eatery is at 15 Totara Avenue, New Lynn, Auckland. Open Tuesday-Friday 5pm-9pm, Saturday and Sunday 11am-9pm.

Perzen Patel on the iconic dish that both unites and divides India.

Friday nights are takeaway nights in my household – there’s simply not enough steam in the parent engine to cook one more meal. The challenge, of course, is ordering something that everyone will eat. Last year, I cracked it: we started ordering biryani.

The fluffy, yellow-tinged aromatic rice at the top, sitting among a bed of boiled eggs, was perfect for my spice-hating toddler. The juicy, almost-falling-apart pieces of lamb loved by my “I need to eat meat everyday” husband. As for me, there’s nothing that satisfies my Indian soul more than a bowl of rice. But what I loved the most was that there’s almost always enough leftovers for Saturday lunch. One more meal conundrum solved!

A celebration of all that’s great about Indian food

Growing up, biryani was not something we ate regularly or cooked at home. That’s because it tastes best when cooked slowly, ideally in a large copper handi over a wood fire. Imagine: a heady aroma of whole spices slow-cooking, the vibrant colour of marinated meat cooking in its own juices, and long grains of rice bringing everything together. Digging around a big pot of biryani for that perfectly succulent piece of lamb before someone else steals it. Not quite the same experience when cooked at home in small quantities.

My grandpa, the OG food connoisseur, taught me that if there was a party worthy of biryani, it had to be ordered from Jaffer Bhai’s Delhi Darbar on Grant Road, Mumbai. While Jaffer Bhai – fondly known as the Biryani King of Mumbai – passed away in 2020, his restaurant established in 1973 continues to serve biryani that’s consistently out of this world.

A dish that both unites and divides

It’s widely believed that biryani has its origin in Persia, and was introduced to the Indian subcontinent by the Mughals. Legend has it that Queen Mumtaz Mahal once visited her army troops only to find out the soldiers were undernourished, so she asked the cooks to create a dish that featured both meat and rice and what originated was biryani. Lucknow, a city in Uttar Pradesh, claims to be the home of biryani – though in typical Indian fashion, so do Kolkata and Hyderabad. 

In a country where the food you eat changes every 100km, biryani is a dish we all eat, and one that continues to evolve. Hyderabadi, Mumbai, Awadhi, Thalasserary – there are so many different styles of biryani to choose from. It’s a dish that both unites and divides and is the source of endless debates. Go to any Indian party and you’ll find a middle-aged uncle or aunty making the case for how the biryani they ate from such-and-such place is actually the best one there is.

Is vegetarian biryani still biryani?

Biryani’s signature flavour comes from its “pakki-dum-pukht” style of cooking. Dum pukht literally translates to “breathe and cook” in Hindi and pakki stands for ripe or already cooked. Unlike pulao, where both meat and rice are cooked together, biryani is layered.

The meat goes in first, followed by a layer of fried shallots and saffron water – and fried cashews if you want to go all out – which is followed by rice. When cooking for big crowds, the layers would be repeated twice or even thrice depending on the depth of your utensil before being sealed with a simple dough and being slow-cooked a final time. The idea is that the steam produced by the layers of meat gravy rise, further tenderising the meat and rice, and then condenses, keeping everything in the pot from drying out.

Does that still work if there is no meat and therefore no meat stock? This is another area that’s up for debate. One camp maintains that biryani made without meat is most definitely pulao, while the other soldiers on making all sorts of variations cooking biryani with vegetables and sometimes with egg or even paneer.

Cooking biryani at home

I’m not sure why I resisted making biryani at home for so long – probably it’s the long ingredient list and multiple stages of cooking. Also, I have no patience for making a dough that’s solely used to seal steam.

If you want to make a biryani that’s as close as possible to the real thing, you can’t escape the multiple stages of cooking – but there are some hacks to make life easier. Mine is to buy pre-marinated tandoori lamb from my local Pakistani butcher, to which I simply add some ginger-garlic paste and yoghurt. From the same butcher, I’ll often hunt for Shan Biryani Masala, which has a cult following in India. Finally, instead of fussing with the dough, I layer my biryani in my dutch oven or seal using foil.

Not quite like Jaffer Bhai’s – but still tasty enough to pass the uncle-aunty test.

Finding a good biryani in Aotearoa

There are plenty of places to grab a good bowl of biryani across the country, with many Indian restaurants offering family packs – make sure you ask for the special pack which comes with a side serving of chilli chicken and boiled eggs. 

With both Paradise and Bawarchi on the same street, Sandringham in Auckland is always a good place to start. Discerning Indian foodies (including aforementioned aunties and uncles) will tell you that Ace Caterer’s Akbari serves up the real deal, too.

Alternatively, if you’re ready to cook biryani at home, my small business Dolly Mumma offers a ready-to-cook Biryani Box to help you cook tasty biryani easily no matter where you are.