MEALS BY GENET

The name actually refers to Genet Agonafer's catering business, Meals by Genet. Agonafer originally took this location to have a professional kitchen but has opened it as a restaurant.

It's a smallish storefront, but it boasts a bar, and the décor is spare and elegant. The chairs have narrow ladder backs; there are pieces of African art on the walls.

Agonafer specializes in catering for film shoots, and she's definitely tuned in to Hollywood. One day I was sitting in her restaurant, minding my business and working through an order of yebere siga tibs, when a guy came in and asked Agonafer whether his film could shoot a scene there. Not a bit surprised, she merely insisted on knowing the name of the production before she would say yes or no. >>more

Chicken Stew for the Soul
LA Weekly -- by Jonathan Gold

''Ethiopia's bread, injera , is notoriously difficult to make, a thin, floppy sheet that is as big as a yard sail and as tart as lemons. There are recipes for Ethiopian stews whose lists of ingredients stretch on for more than a printed page for the spices alone. But the telling dish in most Ethiopian restaurants, and among most Ethiopian cooks, seems to be the ubiquitous doro wot , a dense chicken stew, complex as a Oaxacan mole, rich as butter, whose flavor seems to cut right to the Ethiopian soul.

By contrast, Meals by Genet is more or less an Ethiopian bistro, which is to say a homey, soft-lit dining room that looks at least as French as it does African, with music as likely to be soft jazz as Afropop, and skinny ladderback chairs that are probably Ethiopian in design, but Ethiopian by way of Architectural Digest , if you know what I mean. The menu is short: crisp-skinned fried trout, half a dozen stews, and Genet Agonafer's delicious version of kitfo , a dish of minced raw beef tossed with warm, spiced butter, as well as a few of the requisite Italian entrées. There is a modest list of wines, some of which even go pretty well with the restaurant's highly spiced food. In Agonafer, the restaurant also has the most identifiable chef in Little Ethiopia, and her cooking has a delicacy, a refinement, that may not always be evident in the spicy party food at other restaurants in the neighborhood..." >>more

''... Even on the Ethiopian side of the menu, everything is a la carte; unlike Ethiopian places around town, Meals by Genet doesn't automatically give you a couple of vegetable sides with your entrée. For $10 you can add a big selection of them (which can also serve as a vegetarian dinner by itself). They include collards, a green salad with bits of hot pepper in it, a jalapeño stuffed with tomatoes, two kinds of garbanzo puree, a sunflower seed puree, lentils dosed with horseradish-like Ethiopian mustard and a spicy mush of tomatoes and tangy Ethiopian flatbread ..." >>more