When Ficre Ghebreyesus and I met in New Haven in the late spring of 1996, the first thing he wanted to do was show me his art. He was living at the time at 218 State Street, the New Haven Cash Register Company building, in an unfinished loft where he slept and painted when he was not cooking his Eritrean fantasia food in the kitchen of Caffé Adulis, the restaurant he owned and ran with his brothers Gideon and Sahle. The restaurant was named in homage to Adulis, an ancient port city on the Red Sea that is now an archaeological excavation site, one of Africa’s great “lost cities.” Pliny the Elder was the first writer to mention Adulis, which he called “city of free men.”
In those days Ficre used to chef through the evening, close down the restaurant, then paint until dawn in that loft, with its salvaged Steinway piano, a clothing rack he’d rolled down the street from Macy’s when it went out of business and used as a closet for his few hanging garments, and graffiti scrawled by a previous occupant on the heavy metal door that read, “Foster Kindness.”
There were paintings everywhere, mostly large dark canvases lit with brilliant corners of insistent life. The paintings gave a sense of his beloved homeland in wartime—the Eritrean War of Independence began shortly before he was born—infused with the light of determined humanity that would not be deferred or extinguished. He showed me pastel drawings with the driving color concerns that echoed Eritrean textile work and basketry as well as Matisse’s sky-lit hues. There were linocuts and mono-prints he’d made at the Printmaking Workshop with master teacher Bob Blackburn, and paintings he’d made while studying at the Art Students League with Joseph Stapleton, one of the last of the Abstract Expressionists then teaching. Ficre made that art during New York years in which he was mostly working as a young people’s leader and activist on behalf of Eritrean issues. And then there were portfolios of photographs—some of which would be exhibited at an office building of the U.S. Congress that summer—which told stories of Eritrea and its uncannily resilient people in saturated, painterly colors.
As Ficre showed me work he talked about his family: his late father, Gebreysus Tessema, a judge so ethical he was exiled hundreds of miles away from home when he refused to tamper with his judicial decisions to suit the wishes of the dictator and his minions. He adhered to many formalities and customs, Ficre said, but also loved his children—seven in total, one, Kebede, lost to war, Ficre at the number-six position—to climb on him and laugh when all would come home from work and school for the midday meal.
His mother, Zememesh Berhe, also navigated the family ship through the vagaries of war. She came from a clan of many sisters and one brother, respected and tough Coptic Christian highlanders, who all raised their children near each other until war scattered them and took some of their lives. Mama Zememesh had Parkinson’s disease, he told me that first day, and all of his siblings—Tadu, Mehret, Sara, Gideon, and Sahle, then in Addis Ababa, Nairobi, and New Haven—doted on her as she moved from one family constellation to the next. Their language was Tigrinya, an Afro-Asiatic tongue derived from the ancient South Semitic Ge’ez and spoken in Eritrea and its diaspora. His full name, Ficremariam Ghebreyesus, means “lover of Mary” and “servant of Jesus.” The abbreviated “Ficre,” as he was called, means “love.”
Our love began in an instant and progressed inevitably. When Solomon Kebede Ghebreyesus, our first son, was born in April of 1998, we moved to 45 Livingston Street in New Haven. Ficre continued to invent and cook at Adulis. The great food writer and old-school newspaperman R. W. Apple visited the restaurant and after tasting Ficre’s creations asked, in his article in the New York Times, “A Culinary Journey Out of Africa and into New Haven”: “Is all this authentic?”…
“Tricky word, authentic,” [Ficre] replied. “Tricky idea. Food ideas move around the world very quickly today, and if you went to Eritrea, you’d find American touches here and there. There are thousands of Eritreans living in the United States, and when they go home, they take new food ideas with them. For us, that’s no more foreign than pasta once was.”
Adulis was a gathering place where people ate food they’d never imagined and learned about the culture and history of a country that most of them had never heard of. Ficre created legendary dishes such as shrimp barka that existed nowhere in Eritrea but rather in his own inventive imagination. Women called for it from St. Raphael’s and Yale-New Haven Hospitals after they’d delivered their babies; people said they literally dreamed of it, a fairy food that tasted like nothing else. Here is how you make it:
SHRIMP BARKA
Time: 30 minutes
SERVES: 4
INGREDIENTS
4 tablespoons olive oil