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!