Food for Face and Feet

Whenever I take the long bus ride to Seattle, I stay with colleagues in the Central District. Sometimes they're not in when I get there. So I hike my backpack down a block and a half to Hidmo, Seattle's Eritrian restaurant.

There are other pleasant places to wait at the junctions of 20th and Yesler or Jackson, but Hidmo has something special: a long front waiting room, with small tables and couches piled with comfy pillows. The coffee table has a little stack of books, magazines and newspapers, in strong political and artistic flavors; the bumper stickers and posters on the walls are For Obama. The walls are painted in a glowing dark orange the color of red lentil pottage. The room is best when Seattle is all chill drizzle outside.

The Hidmo staff isn't pushy. They'll be happy to bring you a cup of coffee and let you settle down in their living room, even if you don't have an appetite. They know if you spend a little time soaking up the gently succulent odors of their kitchen, you'll be back for the food.

The food is very plain, but pure, to make the kind of meals we want when we drip in out of the mist and rain, something the highland countries of Africa and Seattle have in common. There's a nice bar, too.

The first time I went back, I ordered the Alicha: cubed chicken or lamb, with potatoes and carrots, seasoned with garlic in a mild sauce. It's served like a heavy soup in a thick white mess-hall style bowl, the kind that rings so satisfactorily to the spoon. I ordered the lamb; the slightly gamy flavor was balanced with the sweetness and starchiness of the potatoes. No flavor outweighed or disguised the other. Served with one of Hidmo's beers, it went down warm and comforting.

It came with yellow lentils and the Hidmo house salad, served on the thin, sour, pliable injera bread of Eritria and Ethiopia. Injera covers its entire serving platter in a single pliable pancake a foot and a half across. Tear off pieces of bread and use them to scoop up the sides; think of traditional finger-foods like tacos. If you think you'll drip, lean over the bread table and catch the bits later.

In its native lands, the meal is over when the bread is gone, but if you're eating alone you'll bring the extra bread home. It's delicious the next morning with an omelet or scrambled eggs, room-temperature or heated for a few seconds in the microwave. Fragile but firm and waterproof, it made me wonder if it was ever originally used to wrap up food in a kerchief as a traveling snack.

The next time a friend came with me, on a Sunday. We ordered the vegetable combination: red and yellow lentils, cabbage, spinach, green beans, okra. The veggies were steamed tender, served with the Hidmo house salad, plain iceberg lettuce and tomatoes. We sopped up the whole dish together.

Sunday is African music night. This evening it featured Soyaya, playing what the lead singer Mohamad called indigneous African rhythm and blues, commonly known as Palm wine muscic. Soyaya pounded out rhythms on native snare and gourd drums that dragged the audience up from their tables and threw them on the dance floor. The dancers, like the band, from all over Africa, South America and the Northwest, were like the ingredients in the Alicha; pure individual flavors cooking together.

According to Seattle's hand-out paper, Real Change (http://www.realchangenews.org/), somebody in the local neighborhood has been siccing the cops on Hidmo, supposedly for loud activities.

The band handed out chocolate cupcakes for Mother's Day. My friend said we weren't mothers, but Mohamad said, "All women are our mothers, like the earth."

We need more loud like this.

Dance floor/restaurant. Bar, which is a good point for the neighborhood's free wifi link. Living room.

2000 South Jackson Street, Seattle, WA 98144 Phone: 206 329 1534 Monday-Friday, 11am to 12 am. Sunday, 5-11pm. Catering and space rental. www.hidmo.com hidmolove@gmail.com

Buses to Hidmo: On Jackson from the International District: #14, 7, 3. #27, from 3rd downtown, stops two blocks away on Yesler.