Messob Ethiopian Cuisine

Yummy and healthy food! When I want something hearty and home cooked but am too tired to make anything at home, I go here! I feel cozy after eating this scrumptious food.

Originally written 08÷03÷11
Went to a neighborhood place where the wait would be twenty minutes. had heard about this little Ethiopian place and thought i would try it instead. It is in a really quaint «food court» with not enough outside dining tables, but still cozy and delicious for the adventurous foodie. lots of food!

This restaurant is part of a little cooperative just off Cook. The neighbours are a Mexican and a Korean restaurant along with a coffee stand all run by new entrepreneurs. We choose Messob because everything was obviously handmade and the lady was obviously Ethiopian! The food was terrific and very interesting. We both had the Beef Combo which was a spicy beef stew served along with a hot cabbage and three kinds of lentils, some of which were spicier than others. The spicing was a complex set of flavours with lots of ginger and garlic in everything. Even the cabbage was delicious! There were lots of veggies and it was very nutritious. Good vegan choices too.
The most interesting thing is that all the dishes are served on a giant ethiopian flatbread that is ripped off in pieces which you then use to pick up the food. Thus it is both serving platter and utensils. This is not the typical flatbread that I am used to. It is thin and spongy kind of like a giant crêpe. I must admit that I did have to finish up with a fork though. The place is tiny rustic and totally unpretentious. I thoroughly enjoyed my meal.

A very excellent food stall in the Cook Street Village food court, run by happy, delightful people. The food is made en masse and slopped up onto oddly-​white injera rather than being made to order, so they’ve smartly erred on the side of being a little bland. But they offer you a shaker of berbere, which more than makes up for it.
The mesir wot is very good, with fully-​developed flavours and a wonderful consistency. The rest of the meal is a bit of a blur, but it was a pleasant blur, the kind of blur that you want to stretch on and on forever. When we ran out of injera, they insisted on giving us more for free. A nice place to start a day with good food for reasonable prices.

I have been going here for years (when I used to live in Victoria). The food is great for the price if you like Ethiopian. On Weekends they have the Chicken dish, which is just amazing. It’s in Cook St village.