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Have Some Jazz and Injera at Rasselas
By Jason Ku
Rasselas on Fillmore offers an intriguing fusion of jazz and Ethiopian cuisine. A corridor that runs though the kitchen connects their jazz club to a small dining room that is decorated with Ethiopian baskets, a painting of Halle Selassie, and an Axum cross.
Traditional Ethiopian dishes are offered, all served with injera, a fermented sour pancake-like bread, which is torn into pieces and used to scoop up other foods in the meal. Tej, a honey-flavored wine, is also available.
We ordered glasses of tej and the sampler plate for two that included doro we't, t'ibs, and several pastes made from legumes. The service was excruciatingly slow. Our tej arrived long after we requested it (the waitress joked about having to crush grapes in the kitchen to make the wine). Unfortunately, the tej tasted like cheap chardonnay with honey stirred into it. The sampler plate also did not appear for quite a while, but was much more satisfying than the tej. The red pepper berbere sauces were spicy, giving us a good sweat, and the various meats were stewed until tender and flavorful. Some of the legumes in the pastes were not cooked through all the way and were a bit crunchy and chalky. We ran out of injera before scooping up all of our meats and sauces and another basket was provided upon request.
After finishing the sampler plate, we needed something cool and sweet to clear the fire off our tongues. The dessert menu offered distinctly non-Ethiopian choices such as tiramisu. The tiramisu came out of a box and was still frozen when it got to the table and in retrospect, ordering this dessert from an Ethiopian restaurant was just a bad decision.
Interestingly, the kitchen that prepares Ethiopian cuisine for the restaurant also makes bar food for the jazz club. After dinner, we ducked through the kitchen and sat down in the jazz club to listen to the band. The jazz is less classical and more of the Kenny G variety. The booths and tables and chairs in the lounge are cozy, although decorative pillars blocked off views of the band from our angle.
Rasselas, located at 1534 Fillmore Street, is a fun place to go for dinner and music, although New Eritrea right in the Sunset has better Ethiopian cuisine and tej at comparable prices. Parking is relatively painless and if all else fails, there is a Safeway lot around the corner. A list of performances can be found on their Web site, www.rasselasjazzclub.com.
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