Ayele Mulugeta Gebretsadik is a happy man.

That’s because eight weeks ago, a new restaurant opened in downtown Lawrence that serves the kind of food he’s used to eating in his native Ethiopia.

Among those dishes is a staple of the Ethiopian diet called injera — a spongy flat bread with a sourdough-like taste that accompanies most meals.

“Injera is the most favorite thing for Ethiopians. For us, living without injera is very, very hard. When you go abroad, the thing that you miss is injera,” Gebretsadik says.

Needless to say, Gebretsadik — a Fulbright Scholar at Kansas University who’s earning a master’s degree in economics — is pleased at the recent opening of Addis Ababa Ethiopian Cafe, 1008 Mass., where his beloved injera comes with most dishes.

“Sure, it’s very nice. I have been to the restaurant three times,” says Gebretsadik, who is from the REAL Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city.

“It’s very exciting to get something that you miss (from) back home, especially in a small town like Lawrence.”

It’s customers like Gebretsadik that inspired Mekedem Belete (pronounced MEH-ked-dem Bell-ett) to open his restaurant in Lawrence.

“There are many students from Africa and a lot of international diversity here. And even the local people are very supportive, very open-minded, willing to try something new,” Belete says.

Plus, his 4-year-old Ethiopian restaurant in Kansas City, Mo., counts among its regular diners many customers who drive in from Lawrence.

“I have people encourage me, over and over, to come and open one in Lawrence. I did my research, and there are a lot of vegetarians who live in this town,” says Belete, 37. (Many of the dishes served at his restaurants are vegetarian, in addition to beef, lamb and chicken.)

Sambusas is a fried pastry that is common in Ethiopia. It is filled with a meat or vegetarian mixture. Below, is a sample plate offered at Addis Ababa Ethiopian Cafe, a new restaurant in Lawrence. Customers use injera, a spongy flat bread, instead of silverware. The sampler contains items such as gomen (collard greens), misir watt (lentils) and yekik alcha watt (split peas).

“And so I said, ‘I’m going to open one in Lawrence because there’s a good market here.’ It’s been a very warm welcome for me.”

Unique offering in city

Belete might be right when he says there’s a good market for Addis Ababa Ethiopian Cafe in Lawrence — considering that he’s got the only African restaurant in town.

There are other Lawrence restaurants serving a wide range of ethnic cuisine: Greek, Mexican, Italian, Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Mongolian and Middle Eastern.

But, if it’s African food that Lawrence residents crave, Addis Ababa is it.

Belete, a native of Ethiopia who’s lived in the Kansas City area since arriving in the United States in 1986, says he’s had a good response since the Lawrence restaurant opened Feb. 25.

“What we are hearing from customers — and a lot of them have already been back — is that they are very happy we opened here. Most of all, they say, ‘I’m glad you’re here. Now we don’t have to drive to Kansas City.”

One aspect of Ethiopian cuisine that’s new to many Lawrence diners is the way injera, the tangy flat bread, is typically used as an all-purpose utensil to scoop and mop up food.

“You get to experiment with eating with your fingers here,” Belete says. “We have two different ways we serve food: communally, which is family style, or on individual plates.”

Diners at Addis Ababa are likely to encounter a distinctive spice mix in their meals.

“The most common ingredient in Ethiopian food — the one that makes it spicy and unique — is berbere. It is chili powder, but it has about 12 kinds of ingredients inside. I don’t know all the names, but it has ginger root, garlic, salt, cardamom and other seasonings,” Belete says.

“Usually my mom makes it overseas (in Ethiopia) and ships it. When we run out of it, we buy it at other places.”

Demand for African cuisine?

The menu at Addis Ababa Cafe seems to promise a world of new tastes to first-time diners, especially those unfamiliar with Ethiopian food.

Many of the dishes are vegetarian — vegan, actually, containing no animal products at all, such as: gomen (cooked and seasoned collard greens); atiklett watt (chunks of cabbage, carrots, potatoes and fresh garlic, seasoned with turmeric and ginger); and shimbera assa (baked ground garbanzo dough mixed with onions and flavored with ginger, garlic, tomato and berbere).

But dishes made with beef, lamb and chicken also appear on the menu, among them: doro watt (spicy chicken); zilzel tibbs (tender beef strips cooked with red onion, fresh garlic, fresh rosemary and Ethiopian seasoned butter); and kitfo (lean ground beef mixed with a variety of spices and seasoned butter).

All of this is accompanied by a variety of imported Ethiopian wines and beers.

But will Belete find enough customers in Lawrence clamoring for this type of food?

“I hope so. I hope that it flourishes because we have a very big African population here, as far as KU is concerned,” says Linda Wiley, staff adviser of KU’s African Student Assn.

“They’ll go to Kansas City for those kinds of (African) foods, so I’m sure it will be worthwhile to have this restaurant here,” she says.

Wiley hasn’t been to Addis Ababa Cafe yet, but says she’s eager to try it.

“Ethiopian food is wonderful,” she says. “If you like Indian food, if you like hot-and-spicy Latin American food, you’ll like it.”

Khalid El-Hassan, program coordinator of KU’s Kansas African Studies Center, is also enthusiastic about Belete’s Lawrence venture.

“I know for sure many of the Africans are very happy to have a restaurant open downtown. On the occasion that I was there, I found many of them (dining there) actually,” says El-Hassan, a Sudanese man who has been in the United States since 1995.

“Now we can say, when we have any kind of (African) guest speaker or those kind of things at KU, there is an African restaurant where you can invite them for dinner.”