- Michael Gebert
- Foull at Keren Kitchen
I’m all about adventure at lunch and dinner, but I admit that I’m hidebound at breakfast. My willingness to accept a food as breakfast before I’ve had my coffee usually depends on the degree to which it resembles American breakfast on some basic level—egginess, porridge-like consistency, a hint of sweetness, something. So I was surprised that this bowl of foull, as they spell it at Keren Kitchen, a sunny new Eritrean restaurant near Irving and Ashland, made sense to me as breakfast food. Eritrea’s version of the mashed fava bean dish found at Middle Eastern restaurants—where it’s often soupier—came with a baguette-like wheat bread, likely due to the Italian presence in Eritrea (a former part of Ethiopia), as well as bits of hard-boiled egg, tomato, onion, goat cheese, and jalapenos, and a dash of berbere pepper. It was served with olive oil, though you also have the choice of tesmi, which is a clarified butter like ghee, but cooked with spices before it separates.
There’s a printed menu, but so far only some of it is being made each day, and it’s probably more effective just to ask what they have—an assortment of vegetable or lentil dishes with a slight curry-like seasoning, and maybe a single beef or lamb stew. She has more plans—she talks about recently hiring a Mexican chef to offer American and Mexican dishes—but, really, unless you know the cuisine well yourself, just asking “what’s good today?” is as good a way to go as any. I guess, given that much of the traffic she’ll have will be cab drivers, that it will make sense to have cheeseburgers and burritos alongside kilwa begee, though the second time I went there was a party of about ten cabbies there, all happily digging into the food of home.
