“Hey, I didn’t know that they had food in Ethiopia. This will be a quick meal. I’ll order two empty plates and we can leave.” This particularly well-known line from “When Harry Met Sally” touches on both the conceptual novelty of Ethiopian restaurants as well as the country itself having become a byword for modern African woe. But that movie came out in 1989, before Los Angeles’ Little Ethiopia had even made a name for itself; surely American eating habits would have come around since then, raising the then-little-known cuisine if not to the omnipresence of Chinese, then at least to the stolid reliability of Thai. Yet when a 2011 episode of “The Simpsons” took the titular family to a neighborhood very much like Little Ethiopia, their meal still surprised them, albeit favorably. In the words of the high-minded, high-achieving Lisa Simpson, “Exotic. Vegetarian. I can mention it in a college essay.” As satire goes, this has an edge on the groaner about empty plates, which even in this century I’ve heard Angelenos deliver as their own. Then again, they say the old jokes are best.
Not long after “When Harry Met Sally,” in the mid-nineties, Little Ethiopia did make a name for itself, albeit informally, as “Little Addis.” This early appellation referenced the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, which Pico Iyer, in his essay from that era “Prayers in the Wilderness,” described as “a sleepy, eerie, rather bedraggled town — less tranquil than torpid, and less a town, indeed, than a collection of grand monuments set against shacks and vacant lots and open ditches. [ … ] Addis — like much of Ethiopia — has the air of an exiled prince, long accustomed to grandeur and full of pride, but fallen now on very hard times.” Little Ethiopia hasn’t had long to get accustomed to grandeur and, like many of Los Angeles’ specifically ethnic zones, didn’t have much grandeur to work with in the first place. A count from those days found a total of four Ethiopian eateries on the neighborhood’s single city block. The density of available Ethiopian experiences, culinary and otherwise, has since increased, though aside from a well-respected outlier or two, they’ve still spread no farther than Fairfax Avenue between Olympic and Whitworth: true to its current name, Little Ethiopia may grow more Ethiopian, but little it remains.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
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