YALA LOUNGE
Cuisine: Ethiopian and Sudanese
Address: Level 1, 234 Dominion Rd, Mount Eden
Reservations: Not accepted
Drinks: Not licensed
Website: Yalalounge.co.nz
From the menu: Merek tibs (lamb stew) $23; ful (chickpea stew) $19.50; salata aswad (eggplant) $22.50.
This restaurant is missing almost everything I look for when
I arrived upstairs to an almost empty wooden room, sparsely decorated, with just one other couple eating in a corner. The only visible staff member was one friendly man standing behind a bar that serves no alcoholic drinks but offers an extensive range of shisha flavours if you’re in the mood for a smoke on the deck. There was no music when I arrived so I walked to the sound of my own footsteps to a table in the corner (I know they have a sound system because halfway into my meal somebody put on ‘Burn’ by Usher). The bathrooms, when I visited, were out of soap and hand towels.
Hookah pipes aside, it’s clear the restaurant’s sole purpose is to serve food. It’s a kitchen and some tables, really, but because I liked the place so much I’ve decided to recommend it to you without the usual benchmarks and scoring system.
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Advertise with NZME.I do want you to come here but I want you to forget most of what you expect when you leave the house for a night out.
The cuisine is Ethiopian and Sudanese, cooked by a guy called Muhammad and his mum (pictured above). It’s not your first chance to eat African food in Auckland (Cafe Abyssinia did well in Mt Albert a few years ago and Gojo in New Lynn opened around the same time as Yala) but it might be your most authentic.
Dissatisfied with what was available locally, the owners of Yala decided to import their spice blends from Ethiopia, a process fraught with the sort of bureaucracy you might expect when you tell a guy at Customs you’re expecting a package of strange powders arriving in the post from Africa. But the red tape tastes good, the imported berbere in particular giving enough distinctive flavour to the meat dishes that the chef was, at last, happy to put her name to them.
If you know anything about Ethiopian food you’re probably already picturing the set up: a large, spongy, slightly sour injera pancake with a distinctive honeycomb on the top surface — thousands of “eyes” that give the staple a lovely texture but also fill up beautifully with the sauce of anything you put on top of it.
In my case this was stewed lamb, deep with spicy flavour, sitting in the middle of the pancake (if I’d ordered better I would have got the dish that gave you a bit of everything, not just meat, but I had some Sudanese dishes I needed to try too).
They don’t offer cutlery, just a couple of extra pieces of pancake, each rolled up like a camp mattress for you to unfurl and use to pick up mouthfuls of stew. No matter how hard you try, your fingers will get gravy on them and though the waiter delivered a couple of small paper napkins with my meal, it wasn’t really enough to give this process any sort of tidiness. Take someone with whom you’re unafraid to get messy.
Ethiopia and Sudan are right next to each other but the latter also shares a border with Egypt and you can see a little hint of the Middle East in the Sudanese side of the menu. I ordered the ful, a traditional breakfast dish of slow-cooked fava beans which they make with tahini in Egypt but which is a little more simple here — just beans, mostly, some mashed and some intact, every mouthful a beautiful wholefood experience of subtle flavour (I DMed Yala to check what was in this recipe and received a simple list of ingredients back including the item “two other spices that I cannot reveal”).
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Advertise with NZME.You can dress ful up with any number of colourful condiments but they resist that here, a heap of raw chopped onion the only real concession.
Peanut butter was a surprise ingredient in both Sudanese dishes I ordered — though not enough for you to pick its distinctive flavour: it contributes a bit of creamy, nutty fat to the mix without making it feel like you should be eating your meal on toast. You could see a bit of oil from the peanuts in a beautiful eggplant dip, which apparently takes hours of assembly — frying, drying, bashing, reheating… they begin each evening with a set number of portions and you’d be wise to grab one while you can.
Speaking of which, though the main dining room traffic was Uber Eats drivers coming and going, I’m told things get very busy Thursday to Saturday so plan your visit accordingly.
My advice to Yala is to not change very much at all, though perhaps a touch more attention on the basics would help diners to do what the restaurant does so well: focus on the food.
