Back in 2010 during an interview with the Queen — Latifah that is — we bonded about me being a first-generation Ethiopian, which led her to ask: “Where can I find the best Ethiopian food in New York City?” It was a question I was too familiar with — and one I never had an answer for. Because when your Mother throws down in the kitchen the way mine does, nothing can compete.
The interview was part of the junket circuit for her romantic comedy Just Wright, and when our chatty seven minutes were up, she joked that I could’ve had more time had I brought her a plate from my Mom’s. And while you can find good Ethiopian cuisine in a ton of places, to her I finally have an answer: Meski.
It’s not in New York City, but worth the trip to San Francisco. The restaurant, founded by NBA enforcer Draymond Green, is an Ethiopian-Dominican fusion joint that is full of soul, spice and a desire for seconds.
“I’m not Ethiopian but I’m Black, and if you don’t season your food well, we don’t eat it,” Green tells EBONY. “The seasoning hit home with me right away.”
My favorite from the menu? Their take on what is considered Ethiopian’s national dish, doro wat, a slow-cooked spicy chicken stew featuring hard-boiled eggs in a rich red sauce made with berbere (main Ethiopian spice blend) and niter kibbeh (spiced clarified butter) and served with injera (sourdough flatbread). Their take — doro wat caribeño — includes bitter orange sofrito and plantains.
The other item I needed more of was the pollo guisado sambusas, topped with an excellent charred scallion crema and African salsa. The savory pastry is one Green had suggestions for after tasting an early iteration of the appetizer. “They were pretty good, but they weren’t great. We had to figure out how to make that dish great.” His vision was to have the sambusas be so memorable that “before the waitress comes to your table to take your drink order, you can’t get it out of your mouth fast enough that you want an order of sambusas.”
Chef Nelson German — a Dominican-American New Yorker and Top Chef season 18 contestant — heard him loud and clear. “We added more sazón,” German tells EBONY. “In Oakland,” where German owns two restaurants, “we don’t really hold back but when you’re in San Francisco there are not as many of us there, so you have to kind of cater to more of the white folks, so you hold back on spices. But when Draymond said that it opened in my mind, like, fuck this does. Let’s not hold back. Let’s make an impact. Let’s do it the right way. If it’s too much flavor, fuck it. It’s the way we eat.”
“We have to honor our people and do it the right way,” German adds. “Let’s go full force … and do it the way Grandma would do it.”
Black and brown women are at the center of Meski. The idea came from Guma Fassil, a friend of Green’s who grew up working in his family’s Ethiopian restaurant in Berkeley, which his Mom opened in the early ‘90s. There he spent his childhood, rising from busboy to server to eventually managing the place. Through his party and event promotion work years later, he met a rookie Green and eventually pitched the idea of a contemporary Californian eatery through an Ethiopian lens.
“I am a huge supporter of my friends that work hard. I’m not a huge supporter of people that don’t work hard. I’ve seen [Guma’s] work ethic. [He’s like,] ‘I got the projections. I got the drink menu. I got the food menu. I got the numbers figured out. And he started going through all of this work that he had been doing, which validated exactly who I thought he was,” Green says.
It was during the coronavirus pandemic that Fassil really worked on his business plan. “I’ve always dreamed of opening my own iteration of Ethiopian cuisine — to pay homage to tradition but a modern interpretation of it. I felt like it hadn’t really been done,” he says. He also wanted to honor the woman who gave birth to him: “Meski is named after my Mom, who passed away six years ago. This is paying homage to her.”
Fassil recalls a touching moment months ago when his 100-year-old Grandmother visited the restaurant, “(We) sipped wine and had our steak tibs (sauteed) and tried the kitfo tartare (raw minced beef tenderloin). And when I got her stamp of approval, that was a real special moment for me,” he explains, pausing to add that his Grandmother passed away a week before this interview. “It was a special moment for me because she was able to see the restaurant before she left.”
Fassil’s love for family rubbed off on German, who found ways to blend Dominican and Ethiopian foods to create a harmonious and flavorful menu. “When I heard Guma’s story, I was like, ‘This is dope. Let me honor my Mom, too. Let’s honor beautiful women of color. So, a lot of dishes I created were from thoughts I had of Guma’s Mom and my Mom cooking together, and our grandmas cooking together in the kitchen. What would they do if they were together having fun, gossiping, watching TV, just cooking from the heart? What flavors would come out of this? It’s not about, ‘What crazy technique can I use here?’ — like I would have done in the past. It’s about, ‘How can I connect with people on this dish? How could I inspire and still tell a story?’”
The menu includes a New York strip steak with an Ethiopian-spiced coffee rub, red sofrito, chickpea butternut squash puree and mustard frill; a vegan platter featuring traditional Ethiopian collard greens, vegetable stew with beets and potatoes, and red kidney beans and spicy Ethiopian lentils; and Green’s other favorite dish, the oxtail pasta, with charred pepper, olive relish, lemon and thyme.
For brunch, they even flip the traditional Ethiopian flatbread (injera) from savory to sweet, calling it plátano maduro fosters crêpe — full of spiced chocolate mousse and cardamom-flavored palm sugar. “If you’re Ethiopian it sounds kind of blasphemous to put maple syrup on injera, but it actually worked,” Fassil admits. “My Dad was super-skeptical when I told him about it, but he was pleasantly surprised. And he’s never shy about telling me how he really feels, so that gave me reassurance.”
German took time to immerse himself in Ethiopian culture — and his perfect pronunciations of words like injera and berbere, with the rolling r’s included, is proof. “[Ethiopians] use so many different dishes, so many ingredients that make this beautiful cuisine and culture that is so rich in history. That even opened my eyes to celebrate my roots; with Dominican food, it’s deeper than what you see. It’s past the mofongo and the rice and beans — there’s so many other dishes that have so much history in the country and the culture.” Nelson says the slow-cooking process of Ethiopian food “coincided with what I grew up on. It was like a match made in heaven — the spices and the brightness and the charcoal notes with the earthy tones of Ethiopian cuisine, it was like, ‘Wow, this is awesome. This works.’”
For the trio, it was also important to diversify the San Francisco food scene with Meski — to highlight Black food but also create a safe space for Black people in the large city.
“We hope that we can drive more and more diversity into the city and show the range of Black food and culture. It’s not one thing,” Green says. Nelson adds: “It’s not just creating food that is trendy and is for rich folks and big athletes. It’s food that makes sense and it’s honoring something that’s deep.”
“It’s an honor to be doing this in San Francisco because there’s so much history here with food and music and culture, and there were a lot more of us here that got pushed out, and to come back and really celebrate who we are and bring Black culture back to San Francisco, it’s motivating,” he adds. “It’s something that really is pushing past the food — this is activism. We’re really ruffling things up, but in a positive way where we want to be part of the neighborhood, want to be part of the community, but we’re here to really push this thing and celebrate it. And don’t get in our way.”