Adulis Battersea

Adulis Battersea is the little sibling of the original Adulis in Oval – I’ve eaten at both places and they are comparable in quality, atmosphere, everything.
The mixed veg/​meat platter for two came with eight different types of food on a giant platter of injera with a basket of rolled injera on the side. It was a great range of tastes an textures – something with lentils, chickpeas, eggs, a couple of lamb dishes, chicken, fresh salad, and stewed greens – all very differently spiced. Plus you get to eat with your hands.
I’d recommend Adulis to anyone looking for a little novelty in the sea of London restaurants, but especially to people like me who need to keep it gluten-​free! Injera is a sourdough teff pancake, no wheat here.

Adulis is one of a number of restaurants which cluster together at the top of St John’s Hill as a reward for those that make their way up its slopes. However, it stands out from the crowd by purporting to offer traditional Eritrean food. Always up for a new experience we popped in here to see what this meant in practice.
It turned out that Eritrean food is fairly similar to Ethiopian meals we have previously enjoyed. Both dispense with cutlery. Instead, you use an injera (a thick savoury pancake) to eat, tearing it off in pieces and using it to scoop up the various stews which seem to form the main part of Eritrean cooking. We opted for one of Adulis’s platters which allowed us to taste a range of meat and vegetarian stews which, while all perfectly pleasant, were a little lacking in flavour. In addition, as everything was stewed there was not much diversity in the texture of the food — everything was a bit wet.
At the end of the meal, we spotted that Adulis offers an Eritrean Coffee Ceremony. It turned out that this involves fresh roasting of coffee beans which are then brought out to dinners to have a waft of the aroma. The roast is then ground and put into a traditional clay vessel to make the coffee which is served with burning frankincense and (oddly) popcorn. Although the coffee was fairly standard in flavour and aroma, the Ceremony was great fun and we left the restaurant having had a great time, even if the food itself was not especially inspiring.