Doro Tibs in the U.S.A.

Text and Photos by Britt H Young

Shewhat Café & Restaurant is one of Oakland’s many spots that serves doro tibs, which are harder to find in Addis Abeba.

Every time I prepare to leave for Ethiopia—my dissertation research takes me to Addis Abeba regularly—I fill up on foods that are hard to find while I’m there. That includes doro tibs from my favorite Oakland Ethiopian restaurant.

This popular menu item at Ethiopian restaurants across the U.S. is made of cubed chicken breast or thigh stir-fried with onions, peppers and spicy berbere. It typifies “Ethiopian food” for many Americans, but it’s nearly impossible to find in Ethiopia.

Tibs can be found throughout Ethiopia with regional variations. Typically, beef or lamb is cut into bite-sized pieces and either fried in oil (called “dry tibs”) or sautéed, often with rosemary and sometimes onions.

For Ethiopians who can afford to eat meat and aren’t participating in any religious fasts that prohibit it, tibs is a very popular dish. It’s often eaten at restaurants attached to butcher shops, which typically have restaurants attached where meats are served cooked or raw. For many others, meats are too expensive to enjoy more than occasionally.

But compared to other meats, chicken is a rare ingredient in Ethiopian cuisine: In Habesha (a word to describe the dominant cultures of both Ethiopia and Eritrea) food culture, chickens are considered far more valuable as egg-layers than as everyday meat; many Ethiopian households keep chickens until they no longer lay.

Doro, Amharic for chicken, is reserved for special occasions such as Christmas and Ethiopian New Year, and almost always prepared as doro wot, a slow-cooked thick berbere stew made from older (and tougher) hens.

But in the United States, chicken is for everything. James McCann, professor of history and scholar on African food histories at Boston University, says doro tibs emerged at Ethiopian restaurants simply because chicken is abundant in the U.S. and popular with Americans. But doro tibs isn’t exclusively enjoyed by non-Habesha Americans. 

Eden G. Egziabher, founder of Makina Cafe food truck in New York City, says doro tibs is likely the most popular menu item, and non-Habeshas and Habeshas alike love it.

“It was a no-brainer for me to add chicken tibs,” she says because the “majority of Americans love chicken,” and that includes Habesha who grew up in the U.S. Eden says doro tibs probably sprung up in the late ’70s and ’80s at Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants in D.C., where a major wave of Ethiopian immigrants began settling in the early 1970s. (The city is still home to the largest Ethiopian population in the U.S.) To Eden, the dish represents the first of many creative innovations in Ethiopian cuisine in the U.S., which incorporate novel additions but maintain flavors that “remind you of home.”

“It’s a different story for me,” says Adiam Tsegaye, owner and head chef of Mela Bistro in Oakland, who grew up occasionally eating a version of doro tibs in her childhood home in the Tigray region.

She says Ethiopian cuisine is deeply traditional—until you step into peoples’ homes, where daily cooking invites more practicality. In the U.S., that practicality continues. When we spoke over the phone, she had just finished lunch of doro tibs with bell peppers and garlic. Her American children love chicken: “It’s very convenient.”

While this dish may seem like a simple substitution, its very existence hinged on a conceptual transformation: thinking of tibs not as a set dish but as a method of preparation allowed for the substitution of ingredients. Throughout Ethiopia’s myriad ethnic and regional cuisines, such substitutions have often arisen from significant social or economic shifts.

According to McCann, in Ethiopia’s roadside hotels in the southwest, guests can find doro fanta, or “substitute chicken stew,” featuring doro wot’s definitive sauce with lamb or goat instead of chicken. The dish is the result of the increased presence and influence of Habesha culture in Oromia after the 1974 revolution.

For these reasons, some might be inclined to call doro tibs a “fusion dish” because it combines Americans’ favorite meat with Ethiopian preparation. But the concept of “fusion” suggests such dishes are only made for restaurant patrons, and it doesn’t speak to the agency inherent in creating something new.

“As a concept, ‘fusion’ stinks of the imperialist instinct to civilize foreign cultures and rehabilitate them into respectability,” Soleil Ho wrote in a 2017 Taste story. But “assimilation food,” she writes, is the ingenious creativity born out of both necessity and desire to recreate the familiar. Assimilation food is about ownership: “these immigrant dishes are more like culinary fugues, organically building upon a kernel of a memory over the course of generations and developing into a complicated and layered narrative.”

Perhaps an example of assimilation food, doro tibs is one of many transformations Ethiopian cuisine has undergone in the diaspora. Ethiopian lasagna is another, beloved diaspora staple spiced with berbere and layered with mozzarella.  

“It’s tempting to make jokes about the ongoing effects of Italian colonial rule to wonder if our palates are betraying us,” says Hannah Giorgis, in her article in Taste. “But the lasagna served at habesha gatherings is a kind of culinary rebellion, a testament to the transformative connections within our communities.”

There are a number of common adaptations that nearly all Ethiopian restaurants in the U.S. have made: Most injera in the U.S. is mixed with a little bit of flour to dial down the sour flavor and create a puffier pancake. Chef Solomon Tamirue of Oakland’s Ensarro cuts his doro tibs into strips and singes them at their edges with a sweetness that reminds me of fried chicken strips and sweet-and-sour sauce from my American childhood. The jalapeño and berbere heat brings it back to Ethiopia.

In the early days, Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants focused on meat dishes because their mostly Habesha patrons tended to only eat out for meat. According to Ruth Gebreyesus, Mama Desta, the first DC Ethiopian restaurant to gain national prominence in 1978, “didn’t serve a single vegetable dish at that time.”

Today, Ethiopian restaurants are widely considered “vegetarian friendly” for their inclusion of what is often called “veggie combo” (beyaynetu), or the dishes without animal products eaten during Ethiopian Orthodox fasting days. The amplification of these tsom dishes at Ethiopian restaurants is another way the cuisine has its own life here in the U.S.

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Fried, dry tibs called shekla tibs, served sizzling with awaze to dip, injera, and bread in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia.

If doro tibs began as a way to entice non-Habesha customers—an adaptation or concession to the palates of American diners—then it has certainly evolved into a beloved classic of Habesha-American food. But why has Habesha-American food in the U.S. not been recognized and celebrated as a cuisine in its own right?

When Ethiopian restaurants first appeared in the United States, the media found it difficult to not talk about Ethiopia’s famine and poverty. “Specter of Famine-Ravaged Nation Deters Some Diners, Ethiopian Eateries Off to a Mixed Start” read a 1985 article from the LA Times.

These early articles mention misir wot and doro wot, two classic dishes, suggesting that doro tibs emerged later as a creation to bring in more non-Habesha customers. According to Naa Baako Ako-Adjei’s article titled “How Not to Write About Africa,” the New York Times’ early laudatory articles in the ’70s and ’80s on Ethiopian cuisine helped bring it into the mainstream and become the darling of something called “African cuisine” in the U.S.

Ethiopian restaurant food in the US, moreover, only reflects a portion of the culinary and cultural diversity across Ethiopia--namely Habesha cuisine. By the early 90s, an Ethiopian restaurant menu standard had emerged and been cemented as “authentic.”

That brought its own problems. For example, “Can Ethiopian Cuisine Become Modern?” a piece in the Washingtonian from 2015 asked. They place the blame on Ethiopian patrons who are too close-minded or traditional to embrace new menu items, referring to the “conservativism of the cuisine.” 

But Ethiopian diners in the U.S., however, do not exert the majority of the pressure on Ethiopian restaurants.

The Washington Post asked just a few years later, “why would anyone feel the need to refine one of the world’s most singular cuisines?”, a question that reflects the often racist standards of “authenticity” held among non-Habesha patrons. For the people who make and sell Ethiopian cuisine for a living, the message was contradictory: Innovate, but don’t break from tradition.

 “I do believe that the perception [that Ethiopian food must remain traditional] limits people like us to be very creative,” says Eden of Makina Cafe.

Adiam of Mela Bistro says Yelp reviews for Ethiopian restaurants invariably feature patrons shaming the restaurant owners for perceived attempts at modernization.

“When it comes to African food, [customers] want you to be ‘authentic’ as you can be,” she explains, “But I do not know any Ethiopian restaurant that is ‘authentic.’”

Yet, anything that has deviated from that perceived “authenticity” has had a difficult time gaining traction. In 2018, in Washington D.C., was forced to close after its efforts to cater to the non-Habesha, high-income clientele that had gentrified D.C.’s Little Ethiopia with doro wot tacos and other novel creations failed.

The Washington Post at the time was deeply skeptical and argued the fusion dishes veered Etete away from other “elegant” upscale D.C. restaurants like the “refined” Das in Georgetown, which features “traditional” dishes with white tablecloths. But its offerings only appear traditional in the United States, with the usual slew of Ethiopian-American adaptations: a sautéed chicken strip dish along with both mushroom and even shrimp tibs.

Meanwhile, in Silver Spring, Maryland, where many former residents of D.C.’s Little Ethiopia have relocated, the Post calls what seems to be a Chipotle-style menu at Debab Restaurant (formerly Ethio Express Grill) food that “only passingly resembles Ethiopian cooking.” And yet, out in these suburbs, Debab serves kocho, a sour unleavened pita-like slab made out of the false banana or ensete plant, a very rare menu item in the United States. There are also rippling pools of raw kitfo and even fetira with egg, a delicious breakfast food I have never seen outside of Ethiopia.

The public’s misguided fixation on perceived authenticity has further limited the Ethiopian restaurant menu, and common Ethiopian dishes are misidentified as fusion. Yet the vastness of Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisines is hardly represented in the U.S.

“There are so many ingredients and grains we have not brought to the mainstream,” says Eden. “I want to encourage young [chefs] to think outside of the box.”

Ethiopians in the diaspora cook pastas at home and restaurant-goers in Addis Abeba love to order spaghetti bolognese on top of injera. Hannah Giorgis even notes that on rare occasions these days, you can even find doro tibs on menus in Addis. Habesha cuisine is already complex and modern.

At Ensarro, one of Oakland’s most popular Ethiopian restaurants, Solomon calls the dishes of Ethiopian cuisine “beautiful mistakes” that don’t need any innovation or tweaking. And yet, often in the privacy of his own home, he does.

Away from Ensarro, Solomon, who spent most of his life in the U.S., mixes sushi-grade minced salmon in a homemade awaze—a staple Ethiopian condiment made with butter and chilis—to make what he calls “fish dulet,” normally a dish prepared with minced tripe and liver.

“Me and my mom are creative as hell,” he says, grabbing up pieces of Ensarro’s earthy brown injera made only from teff, as it’s made in Ethiopia.

Doro tibs is the tip of the iceberg. There are countless tradition-inspired dishes being concocted in the kitchens of second-generation Habesha-Americans every day. Ethiopian nachos, “injer-ittos,” both occasionally on the menu at Ensarro, but even tofu kitfo, hell — maybe berbere mac and cheese.

And this happens in Ethiopia, too. I almost want to risk getting on an airplane during the pandemic to get a doro wot burger from Elias Taddasse’s Melange.

Underneath this iceberg is a deep wealth of culinary creativity. But the iceberg needs to melt to reveal its other hidden creations, and it’ll only melt if diners are willing to let restaurant menus take new shapes and embrace Ethiopian-American food as a cuisine of its own.