ethnic dining

Pho chin and banh mi at Superior Pho.

Six degrees of degustation

By Ivan J. Sheehan
Photographs by Sarah R. Sphar

Whether it was a long-simmering, hearty ragù, or a garden-fresh rhubarb pie, sweet and bubbling with Rockwell-like perfection, or a simple dollop of homemade applesauce with a Sunday pork chop, there were certain dishes only Mom could make. Those dishes did more than provide food for the table; rather, they created indelible impressions on all the senses – sometimes delectable, sometimes not, but always memorable. Years of palate development at the hands of Mom created generations of taste preferences, edible documents defining family traditions and stories, and ultimately, providing a sense of place and belonging, a cultural identity. Recipe books became historical records, preserving those customs, traveling the globe as the latest generation shared family histories by enjoying the meals of their youth and their ancestors with the next generation – and, as it turns out, providing a tasteful bridge to cross-cultural understanding.

February 7 marked the first day of the Chinese New Year, a cause for celebration in many Asian communities, including Cleveland’s. It was then, with a warm “happy Vietnamese New Year” – and a nicely chilled glass of Moët & Chandon White Star, and later Veuve Clicquot – that Manh Nguyen, owner of Superior Pho in Cleveland’s Midtown area, greeted me.

In April 2002, Nguyen opened his restaurant with his longtime girlfriend Lehoa Vu, who provided the inspiration for the pho house’s original name, Pho Hoa. (The moniker was changed after threat of legal action by a California pho house of the same name.) Restaurateur was not a title Nguyen had ever envisioned. But the native of Vietnam – who came to Cleveland in 1975, graduated from Cuyahoga Community College and worked for years in metallurgical engineering – has a wide-eyed enthusiasm for cooking, food and wine, and he saw a void in Cleveland’s culinary scene.

“We believed that Cleveland deserved a good pho house – I’m sorry, not just some half-ass pho house,” he laughs. “We take great care of our work. Besides us, I don’t think that we have a good pho house in Cleveland.”

Pho, the famous beef noodle dish and staple of the Vietnamese culture, is among the world’s most deceptively simple dishes: rice noodles and beef in a clear broth with white onion, and garnishes including cilantro, culantro, Thai basil, lime wedges and bean sprouts. “Pho is very easy to make, but it’s very easy to mess it up, too,” explains an animated Nguyen. “That is why you see a lot of Vietnamese restaurants that don’t live up to the standard of good Vietnamese food.”

While Superior Pho’s décor is strictly utilitarian, one sip of Nguyen’s pho chin, the dish he grew up eating nearly 9,000 miles away in Vietnam, is pure comfort. The brisket (other meat options include tripe and chicken) is cooked in the broth, a mesmerizing elixir punctuated by ginger, garlic, cinnamon and star anise. Along with the al dente noodles, pho is a meal in a bowl.

“The basic pho is actually pho chin, and that is our item number one, and that is nothing but the well-done brisket,” says Nguyen. “And, in Vietnamese literature, somebody wrote that if you eat pho, and you eat pho tai, meaning the rare beef, that means you don’t know how to eat pho.” Thank goodness I know how.

There is no better soup-and-sandwich combination than pho chin and banh mi. “In our standard banh mi, we would use the crispy baguette, and the main ingredients would be the homemade mayonnaise and pâté, both of which come from France,” says Nguyen. “With [our] pâté, we marinate it with cognac, for example, and chardonnay, and a whole bunch of spice.” Inside the baguette, the pâté, mayonnaise and ham share bread with pickled carrots, onions and daikon, cilantro and chili peppers to create a wonderful contrast of textures and tastes.

It is through Nguyen’s insistence on serving traditional dishes handed down through generations that he hopes to educate people about true Vietnamese cuisine – and stay in business. “Restaurant is a hard business: We are only as good as our last meal,” he says. “Somebody said that when you’re good in the restaurant business, one person will tell 10 other people, but when you’re bad, one person will tell everybody.”

Doro wat and kitfo at Empress Taytu.

Although mere minutes from Superior Pho, Empress Taytu on St. Clair Avenue is worlds apart from Nguyen’s pho house. Opened in November 1992 by Carl Robson and his wife, Senait, Empress Taytu is Cleveland’s only Ethiopian restaurant, serving a dual purpose as a unique ethnic eatery and philanthropic endeavor.

“My wife’s the Ethiopian in the crowd, I’m just sort of a hobbyist,” admits Robson. “But I love the country, the culture, the history – back since ’82, when I first went [to Ethiopia] against my will, when my mom dragged me along on a trip she was going.”

When Robson returned to Cleveland and opened a family practice, he found an Ethiopian connection in Dr. Dan Reynolds, who had been a medical missionary in Ethiopia for 17 years, working with Senait, a nurse. When Ethiopia came under Marxist rule, Senait was pressured to join the country’s government health union. She resisted. “She was avoiding these monthly neighborhood meetings where they’d learn about Stalin and Lenin and all that garbage,” says Robson.

Senait came to Cleveland to visit Reynolds, who introduced her to Robson, and soon after, she was working with Robson, refining her nursing skills, and studying for medical exams. Eventually, Senait and Robson married.

Years before Empress Taytu opened, Robson and his wife hosted Ethiopian buffet dinners in the building next door to the future restaurant, as mini fund-raisers for Ethiopian students the couple were sponsoring. “And even though the whole area had a sort of YMCA décor feel with a little Ethiopian stuff, we had a lot of fun,” jokes Robson. “People really enjoyed these buffet dinners, and they were saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you open a restaurant?’”

After securing a visa to come to Cleveland, Senait’s brother, Mike, moved in with his sister and Robson, and suggested they convert a former bowling alley-cum-shoe store into a restaurant.

Today, there is nary a sign of the former shoe store or bowling alley. Coming in from St. Clair Avenue, you immediately forget you are in Cleveland, with unfamiliar yet inviting spice aromas wafting around the decorative wood and thatch huts hovering over a bar and two comfortable seating areas, made up of low-slung, ornately carved wood chairs surrounding traditional Ethiopian basket tables, or mesobs. “The spices – we can’t even begin to make the spice combinations here,” says Robson. “We have to go buy them in Ethiopia and bring them over.”

Even familiar spices like garlic, ginger and coriander seem exotic in a sambusa appetizer, with onion and red lentils in delicate flaky pastry triangles. Much less familiar is the berbebre spice blend of hot red peppers, ginger, rue seed, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, sacred basil and bishop’s weed – the latter providing the divine backbone of the doro wat, or chicken stew. “In Ethiopia, you literally don’t go to anybody’s house to eat unless they’re going to have doro wat there for sure,” says Robson.

I can understand why: Tender pieces of breast and drumstick marinated in lemon and sautéed in butter are stewed in berbebre with onion, garlic, ginger root and a hardboiled egg, leaving incredibly tender chicken in a spicy, sweet and excitingly complex sauce. Another Ethiopian favorite is kitfo, raw lean beef finely diced, with a mysteriously spicy awaze sauce and jalapeño peppers that give the meat a pleasant heat. With every first Ethiopian dining experience comes an injera lesson. The crêpe-like spongy bread, made from miniscule teff grains, is used to scoop up dishes (including doro wat and kitfo), as well as collard greens and cottage cheese, all served on a large pizza-size disc of injera. (Don’t worry, you’ll probably go home far more satiated than the first time you used chopsticks.)

The Robsons’ faithful interpretation of Ethiopian traditions hasn’t proven a money-making enterprise, surviving largely on funds from Robson’s medical practice. “A lot of people really appreciate it, and we enjoy it,” he says. “And, we feel good because it’s provided jobs for a lot of people for a lot of years, and there are several of our waitresses who have worked their way through college from the restaurant. We’re both philanthropic people at heart, so, we’re glad to feel like we’re doing something that adds a little something to Cleveland.”

Fattoush at Nate’s Deli.

For more than two decades, owners Sally and Joe Maalouf, along with son and manager Ghassan, also have been adding something to Cleveland, serving authentic Middle Eastern fare at Nate’s Deli.

“These are all family recipes, all my mother’s recipes,” says Ghassan. “The stuff on our menu you’ll find at many other Mediterranean places, but [my mother’s] recipes are what’s kept us going for so long. It’s authentic stuff. It’s not like the Americanized stuff, the chains.” Never ones to argue with tradition, when the Maalouf family took over the diminutive restaurant around the corner from the West Side Market on West 25th Street, the name stuck – despite not having a Nate in the family. “We didn’t want to throw people off with the name, because people normally associate that with a change of ownership, so we just left it the same, and it stuck,” explains Ghassan.

The friendly atmosphere and an approach that favors food over frills – a diner-style atmosphere, without the counter – has made Nate’s a favorite for a downtown lunch or early dinner. The creamy lemon- and garlic-laden hummus is arguably the best in town; the fattoush is an herbaceous smoked pita salad that goes well with everything. The shish tawook sandwich is cubed, marinated chicken with garlic mayonnaise wrapped in pita and sells with such regularity, according to Maalouf, it makes you wonder how the ubiquitous golden arches came up with the idea to sell something similar.

An order of fried kibbeh – beef blended into a generously seasoned mixture of onion and pine nuts – yields three crispy, tearshaped loaves. The specialty at Nate’s, however, is raw kibbeh, which is made using fresh lamb. “A lot of people won’t get raw kibbeh just from anywhere; you have to know where it’s coming from and who’s making it, because, obviously, it’s a raw dish, and you don’t want to mess with anything like that,” says Ghassan. “We have a huge following for it – we sell it like crazy.”

While the raw version is intimidating when plated – it resembles a grocery-store-packed mound of lamb simply flipped onto a plate, with a few designs carved in the top – it is anything but scary. The buttery meat is bolstered by bulgur wheat and a heavy hand of allspice, which when drizzled with extra virgin olive oil, topped with a couple slices of tomato and white onion, and wrapped in pita, is worth the indulgence. “It’s convenient to be next to the West Side Market, to be able to get fresh meat, because it’s not something you can serve even a day old,” says Ghassan.

Hungarian Wood Platter at Balaton.

While the West Side Market has been a local institution for nearly 100 years, Balaton, an east side establishment serving food since 1964, is a local dining legend. George Ponti, the current owner, took over from his father Louis, who grew up in the Balaton kitchens with his mother, Teresa. The first incarnation of Balaton opened in 1957 as Teresa’s Kitchen at the corner of 93rd and Buckeye, serving Hungarian specialties to Cleveland’s growing Hungarian community, which today is among the largest in the world.

Ponti, who grew up in Budapest, has lived in Cleveland for 30 years, and has been with Balaton for 12. He is passionate about carrying on the traditions of his family, though he has a humble pride unusual for somebody with so much success in the industry. “Once before, I worked for a restaurant management company, and we serviced lots of restaurants,” he recalls. “That was my forte: renovating, building and maintaining restaurants.” In the United States, Ponti worked for TRW in plant engineering. Getting involved with the family restaurant, he explains, brought him back to his earlier days in the restaurant industry. It also brought him to his wife Krisztina, who shares chef duties with her sister, Erika, at Balaton, and is the mother of the couple’s two daughters.

“We definitely carry what already worked out before us, and not just here in the States,” says Ponti of maintaining tradition, though ironically, one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes didn’t originate in Hungary. “Wiener schnitzel… it’s our mainstay, we are most known for it, but interestingly, it’s not of Hungarian origin,” says Ponti. As Hungarians settled in Europe more than 1,100 years ago, he explains, they borrowed recipes from their neighbors, altering them to their tastes, changing what was a nomadic road food into a more definitive Austro-Hungarian cuisine.

Over the years, Balaton has adapted recipes to meet modern tastes and sensibilities. “[The cuisine] used to be much heavier,” says Ponti. “Without ruining taste and texture, it took us a while, probably six to 12 months, but we changed it down to a much lighter fare … We also adapted this cuisine to a new age, when we don’t burn it off on the fields anymore.”

Sitting inside the homey surrounds of the Shaker Square restaurant, Ponti’s definition of “much lighter fare” comes into hilarious question as the Hungarian Wood Platter for two arrives: three sizable pieces of wiener schnitzel, fried onion straws atop two broiled pork cutlets, two large lengths of kielbasa, spaetzle with paprikás gravy, mashed potatoes with parsley and paprika, a stuffed cabbage roll, and artfully cut tomatoes, cucumbers and lemons. The wiener schnitzel, roughly the size of a Sasquatch footprint, features a crunchy breaded exterior that gives way to velvety veal – a classic. The kielbasa has a refreshing bite as does the paprikás spaetzle, and the stuffed cabbage comes bathed in a tomato-paprika sauce that provides a sweet kick and a counterpoint to the savory cabbage. While this platter “for two” is borderline over-the-top, you are missing the point if you focus on its size.

“Some places, not too many, offer these kind of food-sharing ideas, so it’s a great thing psychologically, as well. It’s not just the food … it’s the sentiment,” explains Ponti. “Sharing a dinner from a centerpiece, either with family, or a good friend or a lady friend, it gives it a very romantic, extra feeling. It elevates those emotions, that togetherness.”

Feijoada at Sergio’s Saravá.

Cleveland’s small-town diversity may be best illustrated in the ethnic melting pot of Shaker Square restaurants, where Balaton shares its home with another family-run restaurant: Sergio’s Saravá.

Sergio Abramof is a legend all his own in Cleveland and beyond, having won numerous accolades for his Brazilian cuisine, a unique fixture in northeast Ohio. As a chef and restaurateur for nearly 30 years, including 14 years as executive chef of storied Cleveland restaurant Giovanni’s and a stint with a successful catering business, Abramof had honed his skills long before opening his namesake University Circle restaurant in January 1995. In 2005, as the menu at that location grew to include more Mediterranean influences, the Brazilian native from Belo Horizonte remained committed to the cuisine of his homeland, with his wife Susan and son Julian involved in restaurant development – a true family operation.

“The street foods of Brazil were my inspiration for most of the menu,” notes Abramof. “That is the tastiest food in the world, and always a true reflection of the people and fresh local ingredients of that country.” Among his menu favorites is shrimp baiana, panseared shrimp in a spicy garlic and coconut milk sauce, with tomato and scallion over rice.

Saravá is a sleek, sprawling spot, with lively Latin music setting the stage for an evening of sharing street plates. Another favorite of Abramof’s, the pão de queijo, are balls of cheese bread made with tapioca flour and served with tomato relish. The plump snacks are remarkably airy with a chewy texture, complemented by the assertively acidic relish and making for a plate that’s difficult to consider sharing. Other street plates – such as the beef churasco, perfectly bite-size cuts of lean beef with pronounced grill flavor on two wooden skewers, served alongside an herbaceous green sauce akin to the Argentinean chimichurri – are no less addictive.

Feijoada is a Brazilian classic that not only represents Abramof’s memories of Brazil, but the entire heritage and history of the country. “Feijoada is the child of Brazilian slavery,” explains Abramof. “The dish evolved from a pot of black beans boiled up with all the lesser cuts of pork. It eventually developed into an elaborate stew built around the beans and cooked with assorted meats, smoked pork and sausages. The dish is as sophisticated as a good French cassoulet.”

Feijoada is traditionally served in multiple courses, typically starting with a black bean soup, followed by separate platters of meats, rice and shredded kale, accompanied by citrus fruits, various relishes, hot peppers and toasted farofa (finely ground meal of cassava toasted in oil), which diners are left to mix as they please. For the uninitiated, Abramof has kindly taken out some of the guesswork. “The feijoada I serve at Saravá is my own recipe and presentation, one that I feel works well in a restaurant setting,” he explains. “We serve it all in one bowl: Rice on the bottom, topped with feijoada, grilled linguiça sausage and farofa. For a tasty relish, we add carioca tomato relish, and fried spinach on the side.”

The bowl is certainly sizable enough to share with another person (more of Ponti’s cherished togetherness), and is a truly gratifying, stick-to-your-ribs creation, with a proportionate amount of rice that does not overwhelm the garlicky linguiça, smoked bacon, ham and tender pork loin amid the black bean stew. The provided tomato relish and orange slices lend a piquant touch to the savory foundation, while the fried spinach provides an excellent textural snap.

(Clockwise from top) Carne asada Mi Pueblo, pollo Azteca, lomo de res en chili de arbol at Mi Pueblo on Euclid.

Abramof has worked hard to bring traditional Latin American flavors to northeast Ohio palates, but he is not the only one. For more than 20 years, Luis Medina and his family have been happily serving Clevelanders authentic Mexican fare from Zacatecas, Michoacán and Jalisco at the family’s two Mi Pueblo locations.

The family includes Medina, his brother Jose, and mother and father. The family first found themselves in Chicago, while Medina and Jose worked in manufacturing, building motors that powered elevators and escalators. The brothers were transferred to Cleveland to teach others the manufacturing techniques. “[Cleveland] offered better opportunities, so we stayed here,” says Medina.

One thing they didn’t find, however, were restaurants catering to their Mexican heritage. “It was in 1986, in June; we were just a family business, and at that time, there weren’t [places] where you could buy [specialty Hispanic groceries]; there weren’t that many Mexican restaurants in town,” recalls Medina. “So, that’s when we decided to try to do the restaurant first, and then four or five months later, we opened the market.” The Euclid Avenue restaurant came a year and a half later.

The menu is a tribute to the dishes he and his staff enjoyed in Mexico, in the two coastal states of Michoacán and Jalisco, and the more central state and Medina’s home, Zacatecas. “We grew up eating them. Our mothers, they used to cook for us at home, and when we decided to open this business, we asked for recipes from them,” says Medina. “And also, here, in the kitchen, when we want to eat something different that we don’t have in the restaurant, the guys call to their mothers in Mexico, and they give us recipes. You go to those small towns, asking your mother ‘How do you make this?’ – that’s 100 percent authentic.”

Among Medina’s favorite dishes is the pollo Azteca. “That’s one my mother created at home – I think it’s her own recipe,” he says. “I love it.” The dish features a fabulously juicy chicken breast topped with a creamy salsa made with sour cream, tomato, onion and jalapeño pepper. The sauce highlights the earthy flavor of the pepper, its heat tempered by the sour cream – it’s easy to explain Medina’s fondness for it.

The original Mi Pueblo on Lorain includes more traditional fare, such as the fabled hangover cure, menudo (a spicy tripe stew) and other specialties such as lingua tacos. Yet the Euclid Avenue location still has plenty of regional Mexican specialties that Medina names among his favorites. The carne asada Mi Pueblo is a 10-ounce filet of beef, cooked to order and topped with pinto beans and a subdued arbol pepper sauce, with green tomato, oregano, onion and garlic, in a combination that is at once savory, sour and spicy. The lomo de res en chili de arbol may not be menudo, but I am assured it will help with recovery from one too many shots of Don Julio añejo. Sliced rib eye simmered in the same arbol pepper sauce as the carne asada imparts the meat with a fiery spice that initially assaults the palate before quickly diminishing and cooling you down, though you’re likely to be already sweating. It is perfect with a flour tortilla – insider tips from the man whose family passed these secrets and traditions along to him.

As somebody not born in Cleveland, or even in the United States, I have long called Cleveland home. I understand the importance of retaining a cultural identity and embracing your heritage, all while being proud to refer to yourself as a Clevelander. Countless ethnic backgrounds are represented in the Sixth City – the hopeful status conferred on a young and growing Cleveland in the early 20th century – each bringing family histories and traditions to create a vibrant global community on the North Coast.

Just as sharing a meal is a vital aspect of communicating heritage and identity through generations, the dinner table is also the ideal stage for cross-cultural exchange, fostering understanding, and pleasantly expanding palates and waistlines. In the end, as Cleveland progresses through tough times, it is this exchange that will build a lively community, and a place we are all proud to call home.

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