Mu'ooz Eritrian Restaurant

What is it about Moorooka and hard to find restaurants? It took us two attempts to find this place because Mu'ooz has an upstairs expresso bar as well. We approached the casually chatting trio inside, asked for a menu and they redirected us to the real Mu'ooz downstairs.

As we were walking down the stairwell, another group of people asked if we were looking for Mu'ooz and said it was only a little further down the corridor.

It's hidden away in a little corner.

Don't trust their online menus by the way, more than half of the dishes aren't on the actual restaurant menu. Its a shame because I really wanted to try some of the dishes on their online menu. What I really like about the share platters in Mu'ooz is that you can pick and choose what you want from their menu to be on their share platter. The portions appear much bigger as well and you can easily deduce what dish is what when it arrives.

Mains mostly

Desserts, entrees and salads

The interior of the shop is interesting, the furniture is quite plain but there is a lot of interesting details like the artwork decorating the walls and the little alcove where they have a traditional setting for coffee making.

So many cups!

Some of the artwork on display

There were candles everywhere

We ordered these sambusa sig'ha, as our entree. They remind me of samosas, oddly enough? They're a golden brown triangle filled with a mildly spicy minced beef filling. The dipping sauce, silsie, is a tomato based sauce that later appeared in Jubi's mushroom wot, it's consistency is of a thick chunky sauce like you'd use for a pasta. It had a very interesting combination of spices and I'd really enjoy a jar of this stuff to use on sandwiches and things, very rich tomato flavour with a good spice.

Here is an interior shot, it seems to have bits of onion and carrot in there as far as I'm aware.

I ordered the beef zighni, a spicy curry flavoured with berbere, onion, garlic, tomato and tasame. I like the extra little scroll of injera that was piled on the side of the plate, it made it much easier to dip in the food. I found the holes in here to be a bit larger than in Yeshi Buna and the injera to be a lot sourer and thicker too. The beef zighni was good, but nothing particular special. I would not order this again.

On the other hand, I got Jubi to order the kantisha over the duba, basically mushroom stew over pumpkin stew. I hate pumpkin, so I heavily influenced her towards mushroom. It was an utterly delicious stew made out of white mushrooms, capsicum, berbere, onions, garlic and tomato. The sauce tasted to me a lot like the dipping sauce from our entree. There was no side salad with this despite what the menu says and of course, injera. I mostly ate Jubi's and was trying heavily to get her to swap dinners with me. I failed.

We decided to be authentic and order the traditional coffee too. You have it at the end of your meal and have a bit of a chat while you're drinking it. It's made out of a very, very strong ground coffee, I read somewhere that outside of a restaurant setting, the coffee is roasted and ground in front of you, then poured for all the guests in one continuous stream so the coffee grounds don't settle in a cup. The teapot used is called a jebena and it doesn't support its own weight, wobbling alarmingly from side to side when I tried to put it down on the table.

Jubi and I, rarely drink coffee and this coffee is very intense. We initially hated it due to the very intense expresso like taste, with a pronounced sourness and earthiness of flavour. After the end of the first cup, it wasn't so bad. By the second cup, we were praising it's merits, likening it the fine juice of a sour cherry drink and by the third drink, we cycled through conversation topics at the speed of light. We were buzzing so hard, when I got home and was talking to my Boyfriend, he asked me to repeat every sentence because I was speaking so fast. Everything was hilarious and it was like the world was extremely clear and sharply focused. That coffee is good stuff.

Mu'Ooz Eritrean Restaurant
Atmosphere: 6, tucked away, alternatively a bit dimly lit and brightly lit depending on where you were sitting. We initially were sat down besides a column before I asked to move into better light for photo taking purposes.
Service: 6, the food did take a while coming to us with no explanation either. There were not many waitresses around very often and I have no idea how we would've notified them if we had any concerns. We got our food though and the lady at the cash register was very cheerful, if a bit new to her job.
Food: 8, very good. The kantisha was amazing. I'd go here again to try some of the other vegetarian fare for sure.