Restaurant Review: Little Ethiopia Restaurant

Little Ethiopia Restaurant

Owning a restaurant is hard work. But Tensay Assress has double the work on his plate. He is the head chef and owner of  Little Ethiopia Restaurant. His restaurant isn't just a business but a way for him to share his culture with Americans. 

"Most of them, this is their first time doing this," Assress said. "Also this is the first time people are eating with their fingers. So all of the different experiences. You see people enjoying it, you see people trying to share a different culture. That's what actually helps you keep going in this business."

Ethiopian food focuses on enhancing the spices and bringing out their flavors. Assress relates it to Indian and Mexican food since they use many kinds of curry and focus on sauces. 

"For some Americans, it might be considered a little spicy," Assress warned. "It's probably one of the most expensive foods to prepare compared to Italian food and all other food because so many spices goes into it."

Tensay Assress in his kitchen.

But there is another detail that separates Ethiopian food from Indian and Mexican cuisine - injera, a spongy type of bread that looks like a crepe or tortilla, is used in place of the usual fork and knife. In all Ethiopian dishes, pork won't be found but rather lamb, beef or chicken. However, many customers find the numerous vegetarian options helpful.

His dishes are as authentic as the food his grandparents and parents grew up eating. Assress was born and raised in the capital, Abbis Ababa. He moved to the United States for high school and college. Although his family hired servants to do the cooking, his mother and grandmother taught him and his four sisters how to cook. Ever since, cooking has been one of his favorite past times and when a family friend asked him to take over the business, he couldn't refuse. 

View Little Ethiopia Restaurant in a larger map

Since he took over the restaurant, it has become a gathering place for his family events, where they cook Doro Wot, two chicken legs and a hard boiled egg stewed in a red marinated pepper sauce. Doro Wot is traditionally made for special guests, which makes it an important tradition for his family to continue.  

"This is a place where everybody comes to meet, especially on a Sunday maybe after church and stuff," Assress said.

The Assress family isn't the only ones who come to the restaurant frequently. Friends Charlotte Shmazonian and Damali Brown have made it their weekly tradition to have lunch every Sunday.

"I feel like when you go to a small family restaurant its like them," Shmazonian said. "They're cooking the food the way that they learned how to cook it. It's authentic. It's not a commercialized thing. It's not put on. It is what it is."

Customers enjoying the vegetarian appetizer.

Shmazonian said that Brown introduced her to the restaurant and has been coming back ever since. Both said they enjoy the good service and consistently good food. 

Another customer, Schantelle Cason, also enjoys the environment of the restaurant so much that she comes at least once a month. Cason used to work for an Ethiopian restaurant in New Jersey during her grad school years and eating Ethiopian food makes her reminiscent of her past. Her personal favorites are the vegetarian platters. 

"It's like eating Southern food, you know. Or anyone else's home cooking, you know," Cason said. "Like it varies from mother to mother but it's all the same."

Apart from the traditional food, customers will be emerged in traditional Ethiopian music and pictures of Ethiopia decorating the walls.  While exposing Americans to Ethiopian culture, Assress tries to make a difference back at his home in Ethiopia through fundraising for building schools, creating water wells and planting trees. He even helps the United States by fundraising for cancer and AIDS patients.

 "We're out here to better ourselves and to hopefully do something good for this country or the country back home," Assress said. "So any kind of studies that help benefit the whole world, I want to be a part of. So that's just a way of giving back."

Restaurant Review: Singapore's Banana Leaf

"Number 53, you're order is ready," Michael Gazal says every evening he comes to work at Singapore's Banana Leaf. "Rendang chicken and curry puffs." 

These are just two of the Singaporean dishes that this stand in the Farmer's Market on 3rd and Fairfax has to offer. While Chinese cuisine and spices have influenced most new Singapore dishes, Gazal said that their Singapore food is one of a kind. 

"There was a discussion whether we do the standard food, which is the Singapore-Chinese style, or our own food," Gazal said. "We ended up doing our own. More similar to the Indonesian food, which caters better to the crowd locally."

Mee Goreng Chicken

The food served at Singapore's Banana Leaf is from Little India, the area where his parents and grandparents were raised. They are Singaporean Indian Jews so they don't serve pork. According to Gazal, the original style of Singaporean food is an Indian, Malaysian cooking with a rich flavor rather than the sweeter flavor of the Chinese influenced dishes. Even though Chinese cuisine constantly changes and fuses with other kinds of food, the recipes at this Farmer's Market stand go back many generations. 

"We would never run to our friend's house," Gazal remembered. "Mom was cooking, grandmother was cooking. Go eat first and then go out. Every cousin is the same way. We love our food! It's very unusual."

His father, Ike Gazal, said they chose their favorite meals they made at home to serve to customers. However, they chose traditional dishes that would translate best to customers like fried noodles, fried rice, satay sticks and curry. Over the nine and a half years they have been in business, their menu hasn't changed much. 

"It was all Michael," Ike said. "It was all his idea."

About nine years ago, Gazal had just returned from Singapore and sold his business when this space became available. 

View Singapore's Banana Leaf in a larger map

"It just looked right," Gazal said. "It looked like the kind of place where you would open up a Singaporean restaurant in, which is called a hocker center in Singapore. Small shops, this was the perfect spot."

Ike said Michael initially wanted to only sell rohi paratha, grilled Indian bread with curry dipping sauce. But since they were starting the business, they decided to have a full menu. Now that he just got back from Asia, Gazal plans to add a few Chinese-inspired dishes to the menu in the upcoming months. 

"It's fun to provide a service where people are very happy with your product," Gazal said. "You know, usually when you provide a product you don't see their reaction. With food, you see it right away. Sometimes negative but for the most part, it's been a very positive experience because people come back."

And customers continue coming back like Judy Zhou, a student at USC. Her friend told her about the stand and she has been coming back since. She said that the consistent good curry and good service makes this stand one of her favorites at the Farmer's Market.

"Well the food is really good for one," Zhou said. "And it's not like super expensive. Every time I've gone I've had a really good experience." 

Roderick Herbst tried Singapore's Banana Leaf for the first time. Since he has recently become a vegetarian, the menu offered him a lot of options. 

"A little bit spicy, that's why I'm glistening right now," Herbst said. "It's a good taste, good flavors in it."

"How often do you go to a family business any more? Especially in a big city," Gazal said. "The parents are there, everyone knows your name, you know their name. It's not a very common thing."

Last Package of the Semester with ATVN

Reporting this semester for ATVN has been quite the experience. I had my ultimate highs (my last package) as well as lows (the one before that). But overall this has been a great learning experience that has shaped a lot of what I want to do in my career.

Reporting is a hard job. A VERY HARD JOB. But at the end of the day, when a good package is done at the end of the day, there isn't another rewarding feeling. I learned a lot. The main thing I learned was how to ask questions, which originally started during my internship with George Pennacchio. I also learned that doing multiple stand ups is probably a good idea, especially when I don't know where the story is going. But at the end of the day, as long as it airs, I did my job. It may not have been fantastic, but I did my job.

It was great working with all of the executive producers and I wish them the best of luck with next semester and onwards!

High Heels have High Costs...Not Just to the Wallet

Despite stress fractures, torn ligaments and blisters, women still remain faithful to the perfect six-inch heels that top off the perfect outfit. Women feel like there's nothing like wearing heels to elongate their legs, but are they really worth it?

Marissa Lyman thought so when she put on her bright blue four-inch heels for her final sorority event at the beginning of May. Even though they were a little too small, she wasn't about to let size stop her from wearing them.

"I was determined to keep them on all night," Lyman remembers. "So I did keep them on and they started getting painful about an hour in."

Lyman woke up the next morning to an excruciating pain in her big toe on her right foot. She doesn't recall falling or tripping so she assumed the pain was from wearing the shoes for too long. Thinking it would get better, she continued to ignore the pain and wear heels. Six months later, Lyman finally saw a podiatrist

because the pain was only getting worse.

Her podiatrist diagnosed her with sesamoiditis, an irritation of the tiny bones in the tendons beneath the big toe called sesamoids. Sesamoiditis is also a type of tendonitis because the tendons around the tiny bones become inflamed as well. These bones and tendons are important when a person pushes off against the toe.

"Now I'm walking around in this big clunky boot and it's really annoying," Lyman said.

Doctors know women will continue wearing heels, regardless of the consequences.

"I've seen so much," Dr. Mark Weiss, a podiatrist at Century Park East Foot and Ankle Center, said. "I mean, I've seen so many different kinds of injuries."

According to Dr. Weiss, high heels affect the areas right under the big and little toes, exactly where Lyman was injured. These areas become irritated due to the high amount of weight they carry. Once the foot is in a heel, it becomes a locked device and there is very little shock absorption available with every step taken. Dr. Weiss warns not having enough shock absorption can cause many more problems.

"Every foot when it hits the floor flattens out because of the reactive force of gravity. You have to have that available in order to not put enormous amounts of shock in the system. People who wear high heels all day every day and are on their feet a lot end up having knee problems, hip problems and lower back problems."

X-ray of bare feet X-ray of feet wearing high heels (Courtesy of Dr. Weiss)

Dr. Weiss compares wearing heels to a play ground slide. While wearing heels, all of the weight slides to the front part of the foot and all of the pressure accumulates in a small surface area. Wearing anything below a two inch heel allows room to change the areas of pressure. But once the four-inch plus heels come out of the closet, redistributing the pressure becomes impossible.

In his career, he hasn't seen heels as high as they are now.

"This whole new realm of shoe fashion, they're great," Dr. Weiss said. "They're keeping us in business."

But high heels aren't anything new. FIDM Museum and Galleries Curator Kevin Jones said heels first appeared around the 15th century.

"As shoe technology developed, you know, higher shoes could be created, which of course then gave the wearer a sense of status of literally being a head over the rest of the crowd," Jones said. "Therefore they stood out and therefore they had a sense of importance."

Heel height has held a number of different statuses and meanings throughout fashion history, and today's fashion is no exception. Just like in any time period, women want to have the fashionable status by looking a certain way.

"We show much more skin that they did 100 years ago," Jones said. "And when you can see a woman's leg because she's got a mini skirt on, that heel helps to elongate her leg and look more like the ideal."

The designer has more shoe to work with when designing high heels. The spike, the platform, the body of the shoe can all take on a unique design of their own.

"Technology has allowed designers to morph their creations into things that have not been seen before and that continues today," Jones said.

But Dr. Weiss only looks at the practicality of shoes, not their status or innovative design.

"Shoes are made to protect the foot. Not to make it look better. They were made to protect our feet from the environment whatever the environment is."

Since women are going to continue wearing heels, Dr. Weiss recommends only wearing the heels for a limited amount of time, such as taking them off underneath the table at dinner. But on a night out, he recommends women to find a way to stay off their feet.

Even after his patients go through surgery, some patients continue to return because the fashionable appeal of wearing high heels counteracts their pain. And Lyman may be one.

"I really like the way they look and I feel like today's fashions kind of require that you wear heels especially when you're doing something formal or going out," Lyman admitted. "I'll wear this boot that's one thing, you know, for a while. But after I don't have to wear it anymore, you know, when a certain occasion comes around and I want to look a certain way or I'm wearing a certain dress, I'm probably going to whip out the heels again."

"The foot is a magnificent device, but you have to take really good care of it," Dr. Weiss warns. "If you don't take good care of it, it ain't going to take good care of you. And remember, you only have two feet and you're only born with two feet."

Covering Decision 2010

Election night always ignites newsroom excitement throughout the country. Although our J309 class was just a makeshift newsroom, it was no exception. We decided to make a Website from scratch, and each person worked on a different aspect of the Website. I choose to cover mainstream media.

I was covering CNN's coverage by tweeting. Robert taught me how to make a Twitter widget that streams all of the tweets that are about one particular subject such as the one below.




He also showed me how to shorten a url so it isn't too long on a tweet, which can be seen from my tweets above. I thought CNN did a really good job covering elections throughout the country so thoroughly. And they used Twitter for most of their breaking news, showing how important social media is becoming for breaking news.

After class, I spent the rest of my night doing live shots in the ATVNnewsroom. ATVN was live for 3 hours on Tuesday with live shots from six different locations. I never knew how exciting live shots were until I did a few.

Election Eve

Democratic and republican candidates were out on their last day of the campaign trail. But they weren't just swaying voters, they wanted to get people out there to vote.

Check out my story here.

I report at ATVN every other Monday.

It's been far too long...

I'm sorry to say that I haven't updated this blog for so long...and hopefully that will change!! My life has been consumed by school work this semester as I have been consistently doing a never-ending chain of homework. This semester, I am taking 5 real classes, which has proven to be more difficult than I possibly ever imagined. There is always something to write or a presentation to give.

Rather than making you read tons about my life, I'll give you the highlights of the semester so far!

• I was accepted to study abroad in LONDON at City University in the spring.
• ATVN asked me to be an executive producer for my senior year. Unfortunately, I'm unable to hold the position because it requires one semester of shadowing followed by two semesters of producing and I will be in London next semester. Check out my reporter bio here.
  
• My boyfriend, Joe, came to visit me from England earlier in September and I booked a flight to see him over Thanksgiving break.
• USC football hasn't been that great this season...but you can't sanction the end zone! We've still got the Trojan pride, as seen in this year's Weekender to Stanford.
• I covered Obama's visit to USC for ATVN .
• I'm a reporter and video journalist for ATVN. I report every other Monday.
• In August I finished my internship with ABC 7's George Pennacchio. Throughout the summer I attended premiers, Hollywood red carpet affairs and a movie junket. Thanks to the internship, I now know that being a reporter is a career option I want to pursue.

Other than the above, I've been just hanging out at ADPi and trying not to think about all of the work that I have. Hope everything's going great for everyone!

Runner Sami Lee Attempts Second Marathon

Don't Let the Bed Bugs Bite!

When Haley Batis and her roommate moved into their summer housing, they had no idea that someone else was already living there. Their room in the fraternity house just off USC's campus seemed perfectly fine. Maybe a little dirty, but nothing out of the ordinary. It wasn't until Batis went home for the weekend that she noticed a serious problem.

"All of a sudden I had all of these bites on my arms and I didn't know what they were from," Batis said. "So I researched it online and self-diagnosed it as bed bugs."

Since she was at home, Batis thought that her bed in Northern California was infested with bed bugs. To avoid being bitten, she slept on the couch for the rest of the week. But when she returned to her room in the fraternity, one of her many unwanted roommates exposed himself.

"And then I got back and that night I got back I was sitting at my desk," Batis said, "and I saw something out of the corner of my eye crawling on the bed and I like freaked out and I saw what it looked like and I looked it up and found out it was a bed bug."

Recently, bed bugs are making a comeback all across the United States as well as the rest of the world. They have infested high-end hotels, apartment complexes, hospitals and especially college residences. Bed bugs are spread when people unknowingly carry them in their luggage or clothes from an infested location to other spaces. According to Western Exterminator Entomologist Fred Rozo, this normally happens when people are traveling or visiting a home because in normal conditions people don't usually encounter them.

"Once you find that there are bed bugs in your home the best thing to do is call a professional," Rozo said. "Call one of us to come out and take a look at it. Don't do any changing of it yourself in preparation for us to come out and see you."

Rozo said once an exterminator is on the site, the first thing they look for is blood stains on the mattress or sheets, which comes from the bed bugs actually biting their victims. Victims can’t feel the bed bugs bite them because as they bite their food, they anesthetize the area of exposed skin they are going to bite.

“It’s almost like a true surgeon doing surgery,” Rozo said.

The second thing that exterminators look for is actual live or dead bed bugs or even their eggs. According to Rozo, bed bugs are not always just in the bed; they can be anywhere around the bed or even behind frames on walls.

“If there are 20 pair of bed bugs today, in six months you will have 6,000 bed bugs,” Rozo said. “So they reproduce very quickly. The thing is if females are able to eat blood every day, their reproduction is going to increase as well.”

Once it has been established that a space is infested with bed bugs, Rozo said it takes two treatments over the course of one to two weeks to completely get rid of them. These treatments normally include heat or chemical treatments. He also recommended special mattress or box spring covers that do not let bed bugs in or out of the mattress. These sheets kill the any remaining bed bugs that the exterminators may have missed, since an adult bed bugs can live up to a year without feeding.

After the bed bugs are eradicated, the victim may still experience various degrees of anxiety. Susan Jones, an associate professor at Ohio State University said the psychological effects from bed bugs range from fear of sleeping at night to depression.

“Beyond the anxiety, we see physical responses where the scratching can lead to secondary bacterial infections,” Jones said.
Like the case with many bed bug victims, Batis said she experienced some anxiety. She said she felt dirty and ashamed, even though the bugs were there before she arrived.

“It was a little bit of a relief that I knew it wasn’t me who like caused it or anything because I’m not a dirty person,” Batis said. “But I just felt really dirty I guess.”

Even though Batis said she now feels better, Jones said many people stay paranoid even long after having bed bugs. In her experience, victims continue to wake up at night thinking they are being bitten or believe they see bed bugs when it is another insect.

“In some case it gets to be a point of where people are experiencing delusionary parasitosis,” Jones said, “delusions that their body has been infested, that they are being infested.”

The best way to avoid bed bugs is looking for bed bugs when people go to hotels or buy used furniture. Rozo recommends looking around the mattress for any live bugs or looking for small blood stains since these can be signs of bed bugs.

“These things are very adaptable to traveling with us,” Rozo said. “They are very good hitchhikers.”

Pacific Coast Highway Road Trip

My boyfriend just visited me from England and we took a road trip to San Francisco. We can say with absolute certainty that we drove the entire route from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Pacific Coast Highway. It was possibly the most gorgeous drive I've ever done. From beaches to sunsets, every mile of the drive is picture perfect.

Not a standard beach day in Santa Monica

Families come to the Santa Monica Beach on Sundays to relax and enjoy a beach day together, but there's more to a typical day in the sun. The Veterans for Peace in Los Angeles sets up a temporary Iraq war memorial each Sunday from sunrise to sunset just north of the Santa Monica Pier. The memorial, known as Arlington West, is a place where visitors can honor and grieve the fallen and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each cross represents a soldier who gave his or her life for the safety of the United States and each week, more crosses are added for more fallen soldiers. As American fatalities increase, white crosses are replaced with red ones. Each red cross represents the lives of 10 fallen military personnel.

The memorial is not limited to just crosses laid out in the sand.

The Arlington West includes pillars of the names of all of the fatalities since day one of the war, with one pillar dedicated to the female fatalities in Iraq alone. The seven blue coffins with the American flag draped over it represents those military personnel who have fallen within the past week.

The Arlington West gives visitors a physical grasp on the affects of war, especially when families and close friends of the fallen write personal messages on a cross dedicated to their loved one. These messages include short snippets of their feelings, pictures, and precious belongings. There is even a book where visitors can write their personal messages to those who are fighting for our country. It is important for Americans to acknowledge that fellow citizens are putting their lives in the front line of danger for the safety of everyone sitting at home. Not to mention, that each soldier fighting is someone's son, daughter, husband, wife, best friend, mother or father.

This memorial gives meaning to just a regular Sunday at the beach. It reminds everyone at home what others are giving up just so we can enjoy the beautiful Santa Monica sunset.

Molly Martens admires her dad

Click here to hear what Molly has to say about her dad.

Click here to hear the whole interview.

My Bio

Major: Broadcast Journalism

Online experience: I read the Los Angeles Times online, entertainment websites such as Perez Hilton and People. I have a facebook page and Twitter account as well as my other blog Catch Up With Cassie.

Technical Level: non existent. Although, I did intern for Hollywire.com and regularly updated the Website.

3-year plan: I plan on being somewhere in the United States reporting for a local news station and trying to work my way back to Los Angeles.

Fun Fact: I used to be a print ad model when I was in first grade.

News organizations: LATimes.com, Huffington Post, and CNN

Day One

Today was my first day of classes. As a junior? Supposedly, I'm halfway done with my college career, but that fact hasn't hit me yet. And I don't want it to.