First-timers at Queen of Sheba all stall out at the same spot on the menu. They get through the doro wot fine. The tibs, no problem. Then they hit the spaghetti and look up, confused, because there is a full Italian section at this Ethiopian restaurant in Addison, and somebody at the table always says the same thing. Oh, that must be for people who won’t try the real food.
No. The spaghetti is the real food.
Italy colonized Eritrea for fifty years and occupied Ethiopia in the late 1930s. The soldiers eventually left. The pasta never did. Walk into a cafe in Addis Ababa or Asmara today and spaghetti sits on the menu next to injera, because after ninety years it belongs there. So when Queen of Sheba serves a bolognese made with Ethiopian ground beef slow-cooked with Italian herbs, or a spaghetti marinara with meatballs for the kids, that isn’t a hedge. That’s the food these families actually grew up eating, both halves of it.
Berhane and Elsa Kiflom opened Queen of Sheba in March 1991 at McKinney and Lemmon, when Ethiopian food in Dallas still required a tutorial with every order. No forks. Tear the injera, pinch the stew, repeat. They taught this city one table at a time for over a decade, and then Uptown rents did what Uptown rents do…