Pero Restaurant & Lounge, 812 Bloor St. W. Toronto, ON

There are a thousand jokes that spring to mind when considering what dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant might look like, most of them revolving around empty plates and growling bellies. Mercifully, none were in view on a recent visit to Pero, one of the city’s most prominent East African bistros. Indeed, the food was good and plentiful here, spilling off serving dishes into the pools of fragrant, stewy goodness that are so typical of the cuisine from the Dark Continent.

It is meaningful, however, to bear in mind that there are some truisms of Ethiopian foodservice that do ring abundantly true in this west-Toronto delight. For one, nothing moves fast in this part of the world. In other words, the service of your meal at Pero will unspool at a decidedly African pace— so be patient with the kitchen.

Oh, and take note, too, that this place doesn’t equip its customers with some of the essentials they might have considered de rigueur in tackling a meal. We’re talking cutlery here, folks, so if you’re a stickler for the stainless steel you might steer clear of this little pocket of urban novelty altogether. OK. So maybe there is an Ethiopian dinner joke here, after all. But onwards.

Having situated ourselves in African digs as authentic as you’re going to find on this side of the Ngorongoro Crater — a raised, curtain-shrouded dais cozily appointed with embroidered pillows, upholstered benches and straw baskets — my dining companion and I settled into our Pero adventure.

It was launched with the appearance of an exotic-looking African server who sashayed through the long narrow room swinging a pot of roasted coffee beans. In her perfumed, wafting wake, we perused our options. A document that doesn’t waste many extraneous words with its descriptions, Pero’s menu is well supplemented by knowledgeable serving staff who can bypass its absence of written frill with detailed explanations of the deliciously complicated dishes listed thereon.

We started with the Chef Wondiy special ($5), an intriguing-sounding concoction of chick peas and lentils wrapped up like faux-sushi pinwheels in the trademark native bread, injera. As described on the menu, this spongy flat starch, made mostly from the northern Ethiopian-bred grain teff, is extremely high in fibre, iron and calcium. Its thirsty texture is ideal for sopping up the meat and veggie mélanges that appear so regularly in this fare. Indeed, the bread is offered not only for scooping the food, but as a base for much of the food itself. Many of the group platters serve their various components atop layers of injera. Over the course of our time at Pero, we would come to understand that this East African staple is a prominent component of almost every dish in this culture, so it’s a good idea to accustom your tastes to its dense, moist textures early.

We also ordered shiro deep ($5), a rich, flavourful vegetarian dip of crushed lentils and collard greens that invites enthusiastic invasion by injera triangles. This very cool appetizer whetted our appetites nicely for the real-deal African stuff to come.

The main-course options here run through the tasting limits of carnivorous and vegetarian palates alike (Pero’s website acknowledges this dichotomy with a note that crows that its food, “lies between two dietary extremes: vegetarianism and carnivorism”), with an emphasis on stews and vegan meals.

With the considerable counsel of our server, we settled on the asmarino tsebhi ($11), a puree of roasted chickpeas cooked thoughtfully with a profusion of berbere sauce. Berbere (pronounced “ber-beray”) is a fiery blend of spices that ranks among Eastern Africa’s most popular. It arrived at the table, boiling and red, in a hot clay terrine. Hearty as anything, the dish was spicy without being overpoweringly so.

Up next? The meat quotient of our meal. To start, we went with keyeh tsibhi ($12): braised beef cubes swimming in red hot sauce. The brew was well spiced, though the starring players were a bit tough to chew.

The shrimp tibsi ($16) arrived right after, its sweet-smelling advance making itself known in the near-empty Friday night space before reaching our table. Here, a generous serving of shrimp is sautéed and seasoned with “Pero’s special sauce.” This one falls a little on the spicy side for amateurs, but is a genuine treat for heat seekers.

No self-respecting gastronomic explorer would bypass an option inexplicably filed under the heading, “Fela Kuti Featuring Frank Sinatra.” Fela Kuti, a late political activist and Afrobeat musician from Nigeria, is curiously honoured with five meat-based specialties in Pero’s menu. We went with the chicken tibsi with red sauce ($14), an excellent choice highlighted by tender chunks of chicken bathed in a uniquely flavoured spicy stew with just the right amount of infused heat. Our sopping injera was well employed in this endeavor.

We sealed the evening with the coffee ceremony ($10 for two), an extraordinary extra you won’t find at your average TO eatery. Here, your meal’s rich, aromatic closer is brought to you on a tray, complete with various coffee-friendly accoutrements and — delightfully — a basket of oiled popcorn. All is served with a great deal of pomp and African-flavoured circumstance inside of our curtained tent.

It was the perfectly exotic closer for a perfectly exotic evening of perfectly exotic fare. Nero, situated in a stretch of west-end Bloor St. that’s blessedly devoted to East African, Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine (African Palace is right next door), is a sumptuous experience from start to finish. And not a trace of famine in sight.