When a "Niche Food" Tastes Good to One People and Not to Others

It is a genuinely odd thing to be tasting injera in a nondescript suburb of Tokyo for the very first time in my life. But the fermented spongy flatbread made with Ethiopian staple grain teff was certainly the star of the show at the small Ethiopian restaurant. The place certainly was not easy to find. Located among rows after rows of mass-produced two-story residential buildings, interspersed with noisy highways overhead and little-used rivers, there is a small house that was only notable for the small menu board outside and a colorfully printed menu on its front wall. 

Tokyo, with an ever more culinarily adventurous population, is not short of exotic cuisines that seek to establish a sense of authenticity but in looks and taste. But that sense of authenticity can often be a putoff for cuisines that even the most culinarily flexible in the city has heard little about. This Ethiopian restaurant may be a good example. Not being able to see the inside, it is not easy for passersby to enter the little house. And the menu, with pictures of curry and injera aplenty, nevertheless fails to explain what exactly is injera and how Ethiopian curry is different from more familiar Indian ones.

It does not help that the regular Japanese has very little knowledge of Ethiopia, to begin with. Whereas even the most remote corners of Southeast Asia and Latin America can be learned through secondhand information from those who have done business there or enjoy notable cultural aspects like positive media coverage of sports and music, Ethiopia may only be known for coffee and an ongoing civil war, if at all. Consequently, any mention of Ethiopian food will most likely draw a blank from the general population, who would be hard-pressed to know exactly what they will eat if they go for Ethiopian food.

But sometimes it can be quite interesting to get to know a cuisine without any expectations in particular. Ethiopian food might be one of those. Teff is not commonly consumed as a grain even within Africa, much less the rest of the world. And the idea of fermenting a grain before using it to make bread is a culinary technique that has few parallels in other international cuisines, making it worthwhile to sample even if one cannot imagine what the taste ought to be. With no idea what the taste might be, one might be surprised by what may soon become one's new favorites.

Unfortunately, at least in my case, injera was not one of those "I found a new favorite" moments for me. Fermentation furnishes teff with a distinctive sour taste, which is carried over to injera. Despite the heavily spiced flavors of the curries that the injera is eaten with, the more bites one takes of the injera, the heavier the sour taste accumulates. For people used to having their curries with naan or rice, with their generally neutral taste, the fact that injera introduced such a different set of flavors to the curries comes as a big surprise. For me, unfortunately, that sourness came off as rather unpleasant.

For that exact same reason, it is understandable how Ethiopians who grew up on injera would miss it if they do not have it for some time. Cravings, psychologically speaking, come from flavor profiles that cannot be replicated easily with widely available alternatives. In other words, if one craves a dish, but another dish with a similar taste exists, the alternative can very likely help satisfy the craving. The injera curry combination is not a taste that finds easy alternatives in Japan. Sour as injera may be, it is much subtler than the equivalent of vinegar or pickles, making alternatives hard to come by.

That distinctive taste of injera might help explain why the little Ethiopian restaurant survives in the middle of a residential neighborhood, far away from commercial areas with constant foot traffic of people looking to eat. The Ethiopian owner of the establishment perhaps does not expect the average Japanese to enjoy injera even if they are adventurous enough to try it for the first time. But to cater to the tastebuds of the small Ethiopian community that no doubt patronize the restaurant, the owner cannot minimize the sour taste that they sorely miss while living in Japan.

Scientific studies often attempt to find absolute answers to what makes food taste good universally, by pointing to the presence of complex flavors that balance the sweet, salty, and umami. But the reality is that not all foods that one culture finds to be pleasant can easily translate into universal acceptance. Yet the injera example shows that, while the niche tastebuds of some cultures may not transcend borders, they thrive within the cultural contexts that gave birth to them, as there are few alternatives elsewhere. That is precisely why they continue to exist and be loved in their indigenous cultures.