Simeon Wallis has a strong desire to connect to his culture, and connect his culture to others, through food. He founded Tizita Eats to do just that. Tizita is an Ethiopian pop-up focusing on three fundamental dishes in a cuisine that begs you to dive in with all five senses.
Ethiopian food is incredibly aromatic, leaning on fragrant herbs and spices to liven dishes. Wallis says some guests’ first interaction with Tizita is the smell wafting down the block. What they’re smelling is typically sega wat, a dish Wallis recommends to the uninitiated. It’s made of beef simmered in a rich tomato sauce with berbere and spiced butter and eaten with injera, a spongy flatbread perfect for sopping up the last bits of broth at the bottom of the bowl. In addition to sega wat, Tizita offers a vegetarian version called dinich with potatoes in place of beef, and misir, a spiced red lentil dish.
Tizita is an Amharic word that means “nostalgia.” In Ethiopian music, it refers to ballads about lost love, or specific melodies that evoke nostalgia in the listener. For Wallis, Tizita is a touchpoint to his culture. “I was adopted. So once I came here, I didn’t get Ethiopian food hardly at all until I came to UC and started going to the restaurants around here,” he says. “I didn’t have it for a long time, and so it felt fitting to call it Tizita, because I do long for this, for the experience that it brings.”…