By Gregory Warner
I didn’t travel all the way to Ethiopia just to meet a character out of the sitcom Seinfeld.
But when I heard Ethiopians describe a particular popular restaurant called Chane’s, I couldn’t help recognize a resemblance, in its owner and lead chef, to the famously brusque soup man.
Just like his New York doppelganger, the 71-year-old Chef Chane runs a restaurant with its own unwritten rules. Rule No. 1: Come on time. Lunch is served only from 12 to 1 and he always runs out of food. Rule No. 2: Don’t ask for a menu. You’ll eat whatever dish the chef decided to cook that day. Rule No. 3: When you step up to the counter and face the imperious chef in his tall white hat, don’t, whatever you do, hold up the line.
When I arrived at his restaurant — in the Kazanchis neighborhood of Addis Ababa — well before the noon open, I found the line already 40 long, snaking inside a crumbling courtyard across from a bunch of new high-rises. In the line, Nebiat Mebea is prepping his girlfriend, Kehalit Nikusei, for her first visit, like Seinfeld preps Elaine. He warns her that the 71-year-old Chef Chane might suddenly berate his assistant when the spongy sourdough, called injera, isn’t placed perfectly on the plate. Or he’ll tell talkative customers to “praise God and eat!” (In super-polite Ethiopian culture, this apparently equates to “shut up and get out of my kitchen.”)
“He’s mean in a good way!” says Nebiat, with a grin.
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