By Sezin Koehler

As an absolute and utter aficionado of Ethiopian cuisine, I of course hurried out to Kavarna Ethiopia after reading this glowing review Prague’s first and only Ethiopian restaurant. What I found was not only one of the worst meals I have ever had in my life, but also that the food was only Ethiopian in the sense that Taco Bell is Mexican food, i.e. it’s not.

What they call “injera” was a doughy and sweet French crepe. The dishes seemed to only be spiced with cinnamon, if with anything at all. The Moroccan mint tea was actually Czech spearmint, and sparingly made at that. The dishes were tiny, which turned out to be a good thing considering their inedibility.

Ethiopian food is a spiritual and ritual experience, and what I ate today could only be deemed blasphemous. And the author of the so-called glowing review of the place has either never had proper Ethiopian food or is simply a complete moron.

If you would like to actually have a proper Ethiopian meal, then DO NOT eat at this restaurant. If you love Ethiopian food, then you will certainly not want to partake in this shoddy excuse for Ethiopia’s amazing cuisine.

Might I also add that the artwork on the walls is not even Ethiopian! In my 10+ years of being an Ethiopian restaurant-goer, I have come to expect certain things from the decor and feel of a proper Ethiopian place, which includes pictures and paintings of Haile Sellassie, sites around Ethiopia such as Lalibela and the Nile river, along with posters of pop-stars and villages. In Kavarna Ethiopia? Nada. Rather they feature the poverty-stricken faces of Africans from other parts of that continent, and even a Tibetan person! The photos on their website are likewise African people visibly from farther north. I guess here in the Czech Republic they can’t distinguish between the myriad of different Africans that exist on this planet, and clearly at Kavarna Ethiopia they also seem to think that “African” food is interchangeable with garbage.

What a grotesquely disappointing and borderline racist experience. I have made it my personal mission to make sure that their restaurant never makes it onto the radar of Ethiopian food lovers.

(A natural-born anthropologist, Sezin Koehler writes not only ethnographic accounts of her journeys, both spiritual and worldwide, but also writes modern day fairy tales and scary stories that will curl your toes.)

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