“The dish is traditionally done with dark meat, which just holds up so much better to long cooking than white meat does. The chicken cooks for two hours, under a blanket of spiced onions, and as it releases its moisture, the doro wat’s sauce is created.”
“All the flavor comes from the onions, which are chopped very small and cooked out for an hour or two before the chicken even hits them. They’re flavored with garlic and ginger juice, but mostly with Berber spice, a north African mix of dried red chiles, paprika, allspice, cardamom, cloves, and turmeric. All that goes into the onion and colors it — and by extension, the chicken.”
“Marcus wanted to find vehicles to put the food in that had an African feeling. We have 150 of these pots, and they’re typical of the way things are prepared there: one-pot cooking. All our cookware, and all our plateware, is this eclectic mix of stuff, because that is in so many ways what you would find if you were eating in Africa.”
“It’s more of a crêpe than a bread, really, and meant to be eaten with doro wat. An Ethiopian woman named Frez, who is a friend of Marcus’s, lives up in Harlem and makes us this bread every day. The teff flour, which it’s made from, comes from Africa, and she makes about 150 pieces a day. You’re supposed to use it to lift the chicken and onions to your mouth, but we give people silverware too, because, well, New Yorkers don’t really want to eat with their hands.”