Ghion Cafe

A Saturday lunchtime trip to North End Road in search of Korean food didn’t quite go to plan. The restaurant was closed, but directly across the road sat Ghion Cafe, its mustard-and-burgundy frontage offering a fairly convincing alternative.

It turned out to be a happy accident. North End Road is one of those London streets that rewards a bit of curiosity: restaurants, cafés and food shops serving communities from all over the world sit alongside one another, often without much fanfare. For Food Dialect, it’s something of a goldmine. There are still more places along the road I want to return and eat my way through.

Ghion is unassuming. Inside, the room is simple and softly lit, without much interest in the kind of theatre that increasingly accompanies eating out in London. The welcome, though, was immediate. The staff were relaxed and warm, and with a couple of smokers among us, we took a table out front and began ordering dishes to share.

Central to the meal was injera, the foundation of Ethiopian eating and a food around which much of the meal is quite literally built. Made primarily from teff flour and water, the batter is fermented before cooking, producing a soft, porous flatbread with a distinctive sourness. Its almost sponge-like surface makes it particularly good at absorbing the sauces, stews and spiced butter that accompany it.

But describing injera simply as an accompaniment doesn’t quite do it justice. It is plate, utensil and food at once. Dishes are traditionally spooned across its surface, with pieces torn away by hand and used to gather each mouthful. As the meal progresses, the injera underneath absorbs everything that has been sitting on top of it, often making those final pieces some of the best bites on the table.

Between the four of us, we ordered a sharing platter that came to exactly £30. A huge round of injera covered the metal plate, generously topped with an assortment of vegetable dishes, lentils and richly spiced meat stews. At the centre sat a boiled egg, resting almost ceremoniously in a deep red chicken stew. It was one of those meals that makes you hesitate for a second before starting - partly because it looked so good, but mostly because I had very little idea of what anything was going to taste like.

We soon got stuck in. There was no need for cutlery: we tore pieces from the extra rolls of injera brought to the table and used them to scoop up the different stews and vegetables, gradually working our way across the plate.

I don’t often get the opportunity to eat with my hands, but there is something about it that changes the experience of a meal. With Ethiopian food in particular, it feels completely natural. You tear, scoop, fold and eat; the injera becomes the connection between your hand and everything on the plate. Perhaps it was simply the novelty of eating differently, but the flavours somehow felt more immediate without a knife and fork mediating each mouthful.

My friend also introduced us to gursha, an Ethiopian gesture in which a mouthful of food is wrapped in injera and fed by hand to someone else at the table. More than simply a way of sharing food, it can be an expression of affection, friendship and hospitality, a small ritual that turns eating into something explicitly communal.

Naturally, we attempted it ourselves. What should have been a rather touching demonstration of friendship quickly became several unsuccessful attempts to photograph one another being fed handfuls of injera. This was the least messy result.

Yohannes, the owner, has been running Ghion Cafe for more than two decades. He is clearly proud of what he has built, and rightly so. Towards the back of the restaurant, Ethiopian regulars gather to talk, eat and watch sport together, Wimbledon providing the entertainment during our visit. It quickly becomes apparent that Ghion is not only somewhere people come for Ethiopian food, but a gathering place for members of London’s Ethiopian community.

Yohannes tells me that people travel from across London to eat here. “Nowhere in London does Ethiopian food like this,” he says quietly, with a knowing smile. There is a family connection running through the cooking, too. Yohannes told me that his mother, who still lives in Ethiopia, sends ingredients to London that are used in the restaurant’s dishes. It’s a small detail, but one that stayed with me. Food can make the considerable distance between Ethiopia and London feel surprisingly short: ingredients travel, recipes are recreated and flavours offer a connection to a place thousands of miles away.

I studied the Ethiopian diaspora for my anthropology dissertation, looking at how identity and connections to Ethiopia are maintained and reshaped after migration. Food was an important part of that story. For diaspora communities, eating the food you grew up with can be about far more than satisfying an appetite. Recipes, ingredients and the rituals around eating can carry memories of family and place, while restaurants can provide physical spaces in which those connections are shared with others.

Sitting in Ghion, some of those ideas felt much less abstract. They were happening around us. There was injera being shared from the same plate, gursha passed between friends, ingredients travelling from Ethiopia to a kitchen on North End Road, and Ethiopian regulars gathered at the back spending their Saturday afternoon together.

That matters because a restaurant like Ghion serves two purposes at once. For someone unfamiliar with Ethiopian food, it can be an introduction to a cuisine and a way of eating they may never have experienced before. But for Ethiopians living in London, the same restaurant can mean something entirely different: familiar flavours, familiar customs, familiar language and a place to spend time with other people who share some of the same cultural reference points.

After more than twenty years, Ghion isn’t simply preserving a version of Ethiopia in London. Like the community around it, it has become part of London itself, while continuing to provide a tangible connection to somewhere else.

248 North End Rd, London SW6 7RS