San Francisco Dining: A Night In the Haight (Massawa Restaurant)

On our fourth and final night in Northern California, Cheryl told me she wanted to fulfil a wish of hers she had since childhood, which is to visit the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. As many of you may know, this is the part of the city where the famed “summer of love” took place in 1968, and was a whirlwind of counter cultural hippie activity for several years afterwards.

We had a few hours to kill before we had to say our goodbyes and depart our respective flights home, so it sounded like a fun way to spend some time and maybe grab something to eat.

“Be In” Haight-Ashbury. Click on the “Read the Rest of this Entry” link below for more.

Here’s Cheryl beneath the famous street sign.

While the Summer of Love is long past, there are still ripples of the Hippie culture left in the area.

The corner of Haight and Ashbury, March 13, 2008, around 7PM.

Haight-Ashbury certainly continues to capitalize on its reputation with all sorts of head shops and T-Shirt stores that sell all kinds of counter-cultural paraphanalia. The neighborhood is now more of a tourist attraction than any real center of actual Hippie or Drug Culture activity these days.

Here’s Cheryl in a cool purple hat that we found in a Tibetan Gift store not too far from the corner of Haight and Ashbury. They have all sorts of cool stuff in there that is made by Tibetans in exile in Nepal. Right on, man!

Massawa Ethiopian Restaurant
1538 Haight St, San Francisco CA 94117
(415) 621-4129

My friend and fellow blogger Rachel Luxemburg told me about this local Ethiopian restaurant right down the street, Massawa, on 1538 Haight. Ethiopian is just the kind of funky cuisine I was looking for, so we went in.

Maybe it was all memorizing that mind altering Project Management class material frying my brain that I had to assimilate that week, but I could sense reverberations that this space was probably some funky cafe filled with hipsters 40 years ago.

Menu, inside left

Menu, Inside right

A view of the kitchen

Cheryl and I shared a Meat Sambusa appetizer, filled with seasoned ground beef. This was quite tasty. Yeah yeah, its fried, but I don’t eat too many of these things anymore.

Chery’ls Kitfo Entree, spicy seasoned ground beef cooked in clarified butter with home made cottage cheese and injera sourdough bread. OMG.

I went for the combination platter, which was a sampler of different types of spicy meat curries. As with all Ethiopian and Eritrea food, you eat it with your hands with small pieces of the injera bread. I can only imagine the amount of business this place has gotten from inebriated and otherwise “impaired” youth seeking a place to satisfy their munchies. Ethiopian as stoner food — yeah, I can totally dig it.