Head to Star Bukri’s Catering for Ethiopian Treats

Original Story Published by: Eve Hill-Agnus for D Magazine
Photo Source: ©iStock

This hole-in-the-wall in Garland serves home cooking layered with spice. 

No doubt you have never heard of it: Star Bukri’s Catering, a name that begs parsing. Bukri is the owner, and her sauces are on the shelf: “Experience the unique flavors of traditional Ethiopian Abyssinian cuisine from Bukri’s family recipes,” the jars promise. She wanted to make it easier for people to make the bases at home. But you could also come here and find it in person. 

Star Bukri’s Catering is wedged on the end of a commercial strip in Garland that hardly even qualifies as a strip, just a pet grooming place and travel insurance storefront strung together. Nearby are a car wash station and the Home Depot behemoth that shadows it, and also Gojo Ethiopian restaurant. But here, on the corner of Jupiter and Buckingham Roads, you find yourself in a tiny, cozy, warm Ethiopian home-cooking to-go place, surrounded by walls that are lime-yellow and speak of gored-gored and kitfo. It fills a kind of in-between niche, not a formal restaurant, but more than a gas station that sells fluffy, spongy injera. It occupies a sweet spot. And people know it. 

Panettone crowns the counter this time of year, along with plastic containers of baklava and roasted barley and peanuts. Thermos dispensers pour hot streams of tea, one so thick with fresh ginger, it’s almost brothy; the other steeped with cardamom and other spices. There is coffee, too, if the machine happens to be working. The owner, Bukri herself, is there in the mornings, usually. The illustrated menus on the wall will tell you it’s then they serve ful, mashed fava beans and feta, with Ethiopian butter and toasted bread, or the scrambled-egg dish fit fit. It’s when Bukri is there that you might be treated to a full coffee ceremony, the aroma of roasted beans filling the snug space. It’s quite remarkable, the flavors that come out of this humble place with a few tables, where people wait, or, in my case, tuck into their to-go containers, unable to resist.