And, welcome to Round Three of Tengo Hambre! Has anyone seen that new show on MTV, Caged? I need some of those ring girls from ultimate fighting to walk around me (as I sit on my couch with my laptop writing this) holding up those numbers and grinning inanely. If my writing career doesn’t work out, maybe I could become one of them – it doesn’t look like it takes too many IQ points.

Anyways, thanks for coming back, is what I’m trying to say.

The somewhat sketchy outside view of Altu's. Don't let it discourage you.

This month I decided to check out an Ethiopian place, Altu’s, that’s just off campus, west down Michigan Avenue. Ethiopian is really popular in D.C., and I tried it for the first time when I was there. I loved it, so this month I turned to my trusty Yelp! to try and find somewhere to get it in the East Lansing area. Only two options came up – Altu’s, and weirdly, a place in Ann Arbor (which had 3.5 starts to Altu’s 4, just another way East Lansing owns Ann Arbor), which means there can’t be too many Ethiopian restaurants around if the second closest place is an hour away.

On one hand, I’m glad I can help introduce people to a new kind of cuisine, and one the other WTF Michigan?? Ethiopian is super popular in the bigger cities, and I like to think of Michigan, and especially the college areas, as pretty cultured and diverse. Let’s step it up guys. There’s more than Tex-Mex out there.

Ethiopian food involves a lot of stew-like dishes, usually spicy (but you can almost always order them mild if you prefer), that are served with a spongy, sourdough-ish bread called injera. The injera is used to scoop up the meat and veggies, as Ethiopian food is intended to be eaten with your hands instead of silverware.

Don’t be lame and let this scare you away. Eating with your hands is fun, trendy (see a recent story in the New York Times: http://nyti.ms/xoMADN) and a cool way to try out an element of a traditional culture that you might not be that familiar with. Take a date there, and it will give you something interesting to talk about, or teasingly mock him/her about if they suck at it. Hopefully they won’t since it’s pretty easy, but who knows, maybe your date is motor-skill deficient. And if you’re really set against the eating-with-your-hands thing, you can always ask for silverware – the restaurant is bound to have some for super American Americans like you.

Back to Altu’s. I wasn’t expecting it to measure up to the Ethiopian I’d had in D.C., being nowhere near as popular in Michigan, but it totally did. You guys, it was so good. Which actually makes more sense now that I’ve done a little more research on the place. The owner, Altu Tadesse, was born and raised in Ethiopia, and opened the restaurant when her husband accepted a job at Michigan State. She doesn’t just own the place, she’s in charge of the cooking too, so you can be sure your food will be authentic.

If you want to check out your options before heading over, the menu (with prices – dinner ranges from about $8 to $12, slightly more if you get a bigger plate to share) is available on the restaurant’s website, eatataltus.com. I got a combo with spicy chicken stew and garlic lentils and OMG LOL as my dad would say (he doesn’t understand popular acronyms). First off, all the meals come with salad, cabbage and of course injera bread, in addition to the main dishes. If you like, you can have rice instead of the bread, or do half-rice, half-bread (which I did just so I could report back to you guys on the best choice).

The salad, although it was just a small amount, a basically just lettuce and tomato with a vinagrette dressing, was super fresh and very good. I wished I had had twice as much. As for the cabbage, usually I’m not fan, but I actually like what was served with my meal. It was buttery and flavorful, but not super cabbage-y if that makes sense. Still, it wasn’t my favorite part of the meal. My friend who came with me loved it though, and in her words, “I’m not a cabbage girl.” Put that on a bumper sticker.

On to the main dishes. My chicken was delicious – pretty much exactly what I had expected from my prior experiences

Salt and...berbere?

with Ethiopian food. It was tender and spicy (but not like Tabasco spicy, more like a slow-growing, lasts-for-an-hour-after-the-meal kind of spicy) and went really well with the slightly sour injera bread. There’s a spice mixture used in a lot of Ethiopian cooking called berbere that was used on the chicken and you’ll probably run into if you try Ethiopian food anywhere – it’s a combination of chili powder, garlic, pepper, dried basil and other, less-known spices like rue, korarima and fenugreek. It’s so ubiquitous, that instead of salt and pepper shakers on the table, there was one shaker filled with salt, and one filled with berbere.

My lentils were good, but not as flavorful as the chicken. I expected a strong garlic taste, but it was much more subtle, and almost hard to detect when combined with the injera, which has its own flavor. If you’re going for a vegetarian dish, I would suggest going with the half-rice, half-bread option. The blander rice allows you to taste the veggie dishes better, but the definitely try the bread – it’s traditional and interesting and like I said, fun to eat with.

Salad, cabbage, injera bread, spicy lentils, whole white peas and potatoes, spicy ground peas with greens and chickpea sauce.

My friend went for the vegetarian combo, which is a really nice option because you can choose any four of the veggie options, which gives you a chance to try a variety of things. She went with the spicy lentils, the whole white peas and potatoes, the spicy ground peas with greens and the chickpea sauce. She said the spice lentils and spicy ground peas with greens kind of ran together since they both were flavored with the berbere, and that her favorite was the white peas with potatoes which she said were slightly sweeter, with an almost squash-like texture and taste. The chickpea sauce, she said, was a little bland, but went the best with the injera. I tried all of her dishes (and ate the leftovers today) and my favorite was the spicy ground peas with greens, which were spicy and flavorful, with a little more texture than the white peas or chickpeas.

On Saturday nights at Altu’s they have live music, which was cool, but a little annoying when it got loud enough to make our conversation difficult. Also, we were slightly confused because the band was definitely bluegrass-y, when we would have expected something African or at least not so…American. But they were good, and obviously local, so it’s kind of cool that Altu’s is giving local musicians a place to play every week. But still. Weird.

My conclusions about this place:

-       OMG LOL it’s good

-       Great place for vegetarians, lots of the hearty and diverse choices

-       Eating with your hands is highly underrated

-       I love berbere

-       Ethiopian food + bluegrass music = odd, but overall not unpleasant

New Aladdin's Restaurant, located in Frandor

Welcome back to Tengo Hambre. At least, I hope you’ve come back. I hope you didn’t read my first column and realize the truth (that I’m extremely underqualified to review restaurants) (that I should buy a thesaurus) (that I’m mostly motivated by hunger instead of journalistic integrity).

Either way, if you’re here, thanks. I appreciate it.

In Round 2 of this great experiment, I tried to make it a little easier for you guys, and I split the distance between East Lansing and Lansing to go hang out in that monstrosity of a strip mall called Frandor.

If you’ve ever been to Frandor, you know that it must have been designed by some civil engineer who either barely graduated community college or who was really smart but had an evil streak. It’s like a series of interconnected parking lots with no real way to get from one to another so you just kinda have to make it up. A successful trip to Frandor depends as much on your knowledge of sign language (to communicate with the other poor souls who find themselves there) as it does your driving ability.

But if you can get past the potential for a few minor traffic accidents, there’s some pretty good things in Frandor. Michaels – for supplies to decorate your beer pong table. A Coney Island – a good alternative for Saturday/Sunday hangover breakfast that not as many students go to. A slightly sketchy Kroger – for groceries when you just can’t take going to Meijer one more time. And of course, my destination: New Aladdin’s Restaurant, for Middle Eastern food.

When my friends and I set off for Aladdin’s, we had high hopes. It had earned 4.5 starts on Yelp! (with the all-important lone dollar sign under the price section) and great reviews about both the food and the service. And for me, it pretty much fulfilled those expectations. For my friends – some yes, some no.

We went on a Saturday night, and although it was far from full, there were enough people there to not make us nervous. We were the only students, which is pretty much standard, I’ve noticed, for places off Grand River.

The menu was pretty extensive, and pretty well priced. Pretty much anything you would want or expect from a Middle Eastern restaurant was available (with an optional side of fries – always a plus).

Three of us ordered entrees, (the ones we got were all around $8-$9, but the more expensive ones got up to about $15) and one ordered a sandwich (which was around $5). All of them came with a side (soup or salad) and the entrees included hummus and pita, which came out almost immediately after we ordered.

On the hummus front, we were divided. I thought it was pretty standard, good but nothing special, but others thought it was some of the best they’d had in a while and complimented it on being super fresh. There definitely was a lot of it, which was nice, because it lasted throughout my whole meal – which also arrived really quickly, by the way.

Clockwise from left: Fattoush salad, lentil soup, hummus, tabouli

We all ended up getting different sides (ideal for you readers out there just dying to know more about New Aladdin’s). I got the fattoush salad, with romaine, tomato, green pepper and toasted pita bits. It was hands down the best part of my meal. I could tell it was super fresh, and it had this light, lemony vinaigrette dressing that I wished I could have bought a gallon of because I would eat it on every salad for the rest of my life. Seriously.

My three friends got the tabouli salad (also super fresh, though a bit too onion-y for some of us, but perfect for others), a lentil soup (a little too lemon-y, my friend thought, but otherwise good) and one daring (aka hungover) soul went for the French fries. The one I tried was a little mushy, but I guess that’s what you get for ordering fries at a Middle Eastern place.

On to the main course. I had the yes, conservative, but ultimately good choice of chicken shwarma over rice. It was literally that – just chicken and rice – but it was really, really good. The rice was perfectly cooked, the chicken was well-spiced and delicious, and there was a lot of it. The leftovers are sitting in my fridge right now, calling to me, but I told myself I have to finish writing this before I eat them.

Chicken shwarma

My friends had varying experiences with their meals. One got the eggplant and falafel sandwich which she described as “dense” (whatever that means – I told her you guys need more varied descriptors than that but she wasn’t having it) but good. She added some turnip from another plate that she said broke it up well. The second got a vegetarian combo, which included grape leaves, falafel and mujadara (a rice, lentil, onion combination). This was not as much of a success. The falafel was deemed “nothing special – a little dry”, the mujadara “kind of flavorless” and finally – and I quote – the grape leaves were so lemony that eating them was “like sucking on a lemon-chamomile tea bag.” So. You might not want to order the grape leaves.

My last friend had kind of a terrible experience. I’m hesitant to write about it too much because I don’t think it’s typical of the restaurant but I don’t want to gloss over it, either. She ordered vegetarian cabbage rolls, which she thought tasted a little weird, but ate anyways. As we were paying, our waitress came over and apologized because – psych – the kitchen had messed up and given her the meat version. The waitress and the owner were super distraught and apologetic and rightfully didn’t make her pay, but my friend is a strict vegetarian, so it was a traumatic experience for her. I don’t think this should make you never go to Aladdin’s, because it’s the kind of mistake that I could see happening (a scribbled-down order or a too-quick glance at what was written could easily cause it), but still. Pretty big mistake.

My conclusions about this place:

-       Food was good, but order carefully – some things aren’t as great

-       They really like lemons

-       I want more fattoush salad

-       Frandor needs to install a full infrastructure of lanes, traffic lights and preferably some of those people who wave down planes at airports to direct confused drivers

-       Thank god I’m done writing this because now I can go eat my leftovers

Welcome to Round 1 of what I like to call, “Using The Big Green as an Excuse to Try Out New Restaurants.” Working title.

But let me explain. I spent a little over six months living in Washington, D.C. during last spring and summer. D.C. is a great city, and one of the many things it’s known for is its ethnic food. With the help of Yelp!, I experienced some pretty great meals – everywhere from food trucks to kinda fancy (but still within my intern budget) sit-down places and every cuisine from the ubiquitous Thai to Vietnamese, Indian, Middle Eastern and Ethiopian. I miss it. I want to go back. But I can’t afford the plane ticket.

Solution? I’m going to seek out the best ethnic places in East Lansing and Lansing, take one for the team, and go try them out. Hopefully they’ll be places you haven’t ever been to or didn’t even know existed, and you might be inspired to try one out. If not you can just be jealous of me.

Round 1 led me to Thai Village in Lansing, located at 400 S. Washington Square right near the capitol building.

I think that Lansing is underrated. I don’t know if it’s the distance, the number of options for food, the entertainment here in East Lansing, or the fact that there are not many students wandering around downtown — which the rest of us take that as some sign that we’re not allowed — but most people I know never bother to take the five-minute drive downtown.

I talked to a friend to the other day who said he had literally never been to Lansing, and he’s been here for four years. It’s kind of a shame because there’s a ton of cool stuff down there. The capitol is awesome, and you can take tours for free. There’s cool events like Oktoberfest, which just went on last month. There are coffee shops and places to study where you don’t know anybody who’s going to distract you. Most importantly: there’s good food.

The Starters

Yelp! recommendation in hand, I headed downtown with three friends on a Friday evening. If you’re worried about parking in Lansing, don’t be. There were plenty of metered spots near the restaurant, and meters in Lansing are free after 6 p.m. Thai Village looked slightly sketch from the outside, but I find that most good Thai places do. Also, have you ever noticed how all Thai restaurants have to have “Thai” in the name? I know of a Thai Inn, Thai Fortune, Thai 102, Thai Kitchen, there’s that new No Thai! Place in EL. C’mon, guys. Creativity.

We were one of only a few tables of people in there that night – not as good of a sign. Maybe they do a big takeout business? Anyways, the menu was pretty big, and we all decided on something different after a short dispute about who got to order the pad pak as I had forbidden anyone to order the same thing for the benefit of this story. By the way, I won.

I also ordered a Thai iced tea, which if you’ve never had one before, you should stop reading right now and go find some because they’re really, really good. It’s kind of like milk tea you would get at a bubble tea place but sweeter and with a stronger flavor. Basically, it’s a cold drink that consists of strong, dark tea, condensed milk and sugar, sometimes with some spices like anise mixed it. Thai Village’s Thai iced tea was definitely worthy of anything I ever had in D.C., which is to say it was great. Also, at $2, it was just about the same price as ordering a Coke and way, way better, and its creaminess is a great match for spicy Thai food.

Next up, miso soup, which came free with all of our entrees, a really nice plus. Normally, I don’t order miso soup because I’m not a fan. It’s kinda gross and watery and has that weird…miso-y flavor. I know, but still. But I had free soup in front of me, and I’m poor. There’s no way I was turning that away. And surprisingly, I really liked this variation. It was a thicker broth than I’ve seen before, and the flavor was more spicy than miso-y, and it was actually pretty hearty with tofu and mushrooms.

The Entrees

I had the pad pak for my entree, which consisted of broccoli, pea pods, mushrooms, carrots, baby corn, napa and bamboo shoots in a brown sauce. I added chicken, but if you can’t tell, I ordered it basically because it had the widest variety of vegetables and I’m usually too lazy to make anything but the occasional salad or side of broccoli for myself at home.

Sidebar: We had a serious debate about baby corn while deciding what to order. I mean, baby corn is weird, right? It looks like a tiny corncob, but you can eat the whole thing which is unnatural. It tastes good, but still, how the hell did they engineer that?

Anyway. It was really good. I ordered it hot, and it was definitely spicy but not over the top. The mix of vegetables was great and the sauce had great flavor. I’m trying to come up with another adjective to describe it other than great, but I can’t. Sorry. I’m obviously no Ruth Reichl. Basically, I’m telling you it was good so you should just go try it.

Everybody else was pretty happy with their meals as well. One of my friends had the drunken noodles (“I get it everywhere and I wasn’t disappointed,” she said. “The veggies were cooked perfectly but it could have used some more basil”), another had bell peppers and Thai holy basil with shrimp (“Could have used a lot more basil and some more shrimp, but otherwise good”) and the last had the sinn pak delight with tofu (“Delightful,” she said. Just kidding. “The tofu was cooked perfectly and the mushrooms were really good” was what she actually said).

So I guess maybe they’re really good chefs but have a basil shortage? On the plus side, the portions were huge, definitely big enough to take half home for another meal, which is basically the best part of any restaurant meal as any college student knows.

Prices weren’t bad either. Most of the entrees are between $8 and $9 for dinner and between $6 and $7 for lunch, and come with a choice of chicken, pork, tofu, beef, shrimp, scallop or squid.

Conclusions

My conclusions about this place:

-       Food was great (I don’t own a thesaurus)

-       They have a mysterious lack of basil

-       I am now craving Thai iced tea

-       I wish I still had the other half of my entrée left but I ate it at 3 a.m. the same night

-       I should probably have more vegetables in my diet

So there you have it! You should eat probably eat here if you like Thai food.

Lemme know if you have any suggestions for more places I should check out.