Sharing food with friends and family is part of Eritrean culture and a new restaurant in Downtown Guelph wants to create that feeling here.
Co-owners Kudus Hailemichael and Matiwos Gaim came to Canada in 2017 with a dream to open an Eritrean restaurant to bring a taste of their county to Guelph.
"When we first came here it wasn’t easy because it was difficult to open a business right away," said Gaim.
Hailemichael and Gaim became friends and decided to work together because they had similar business interests.
They had a restaurant in Israel but since they couldn’t become citizens of the country they came to Canada where they thought there would be more opportunity.
It took them seven years but now they have their very own restaurant, Hidmona Lounge, in Guelph on 99 Wyndham St. It opened in February after seven months of renovations to the previous restaurant, Snakes & Lattes.
The menu features Canadian food like poutine, onion rings, wings, and pizza. On the more traditional side there are dishes found in Eritrean, Ethiopian and Sudanese cuisine.
Hailemichael’s favourite dish is tibs red, a spicy sauteed beef dish served on injera, a fermented flatbread. Gaim likes the chicken shawarma plate and said it's the most popular dish on the menu.
The restaurant will offer pizzas once they have the right equipment. The Hidmona special pizza is one the owners haven’t seen in Guelph before. It’s a pizza with dried tuna and corn.
Gaim noticed Canadians like to have a plate to themselves when they go out to eat. The Eritrean way of dining is sharing big plates of food with everyone at the table. If a friend or stranger walks by the table invites them to join to eat with them.
“We’re trying to bring all the communities together,” said chef and manager Franchesco Okubay, also known as Robel. It’s not just an Eritrean restaurant. It’s for everyone, he said.
Hidmona is the word for an interior design style in Eritrea. It also means refuge. The owners wanted to create a casual yet upscale atmosphere for guests.
Gaim lives in Kitchener with his wife and two young children. Hailemichael lives in Guelph with his growing family and works at Cargill when he's not at the restaurant. Both of their families are proud of them and enjoy the restaurant.
Apart from the restaurant, Hidmona has a shisha lounge. Shisha is usually flavoured tobacco that is smoked through a long-stemmed water pipe with a tube that has a mouthpiece on it. The restaurant offers eight non-tobacco flavours of shisha including; mint, apple, grape and peach.
On weekends there is live music from Eritrean artists and everyone dresses up to dance the night away.
Since there are many different ethnic groups in Eritrea, even the genre of music changes week to week. Sometimes Hailemichael will get on stage and sing.
The capacity of Hidmona is 65 people and when it's full on a Saturday night Gaim is strict about not going over capacity. People are happy and feel safe since there is security, he said.
They wanted to create a shisha lounge in Guelph so people didn’t have to go as far as Toronto to have an enjoyable experience with other Eritreans.
