Queen of Sheba is an Ethiopian Stalwart in the Shadow of SoFi Stadium
Saba Mengesha’s 12-year-old Inglewood restaurant is where you should be eating doro wot and kitfo.
Photographs by David Gurzhiev
As a server named liya moves through the dining room of Queen of Sheba, a toasty wisp follows in her wake, concentrating and intensifying into a charred, bittersweet plume of smoke. In her right hand is a pot filled with green coffee beans engulfed in flame, which she shakes as she walks around the Inglewood restaurant, simultaneously balancing the roast and allowing customers to smell the process. It’s all part of Queen of Sheba’s Ethiopian coffee ceremony, along with the burning of incense, the grinding of the fresh-roasted beans, and the boiling of the coffee in a handmade clay pot. Once the coffee is brewed, the chef-owner, Saba Mengesha, steps in, pouring it into small handleless cups perched on top of saucers and offering sugar to mix in. She’s been overseeing the ceremony here since she opened the restaurant in 2012.
“In the back of my head, I knew I would open my own thing,” Mengesha says of her pursuit to become a restaurateur. However, Queen of Sheba is also a business born out of necessity.
Mengesha was born in Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa. When she was a toddler, her father left, forcing her mother to move the family to Tigray, in the northern part of the country, where she is from. Then, in 1996, when Mengesha was only a girl, her mother immigrated to Los Angeles. Nine years later, she was able to bring Mengesha and her sisters over, too. Mengesha has lived in South Los Angeles ever since, completing high school and some college before making the decision to drop out and open a restaurant. “Our childhood was very rough, so when I came here, all I wanted to do was make myself powerful financially,” she says. “We didn’t just come here for ourselves. I needed a way to make more money to afford my own life and still help family members.” She met a man who had a restaurant in Inglewood but was looking to get out, and he allowed her to open Queen of Sheba in its place, paying him rent over time as she started to earn a profit. For over a decade now, she’s been able to support her extended family, both here in L.A. and back home in Ethiopia, through the restaurant’s gains.
Mengesha jumped into the restaurant business with the confidence that she could make more money running her own operation than she would if she had finished her degree. The choice to pursue food was a no-brainer; she had developed a love for cooking at a young age. Back home in Tigray, her family had a restaurant and café, and her cultural upbringing required that she and her sisters know how to make wot (stewed vegetables or meat) and tibs (stir-fried cubes or strips of meat)—the foundations of Ethiopian cuisine—as early as seven years old. “It’s a part of our lifestyle in Ethiopia, especially in the countryside. You start cooking, you clean the house. And since I didn’t have my mom and my dad around me, your grandmas and your aunties will never be like your own family, they’ll have you work,” she says. “So that’s how I learned to cook, and it became my passion after that.”
“Our childhood was very rough, so when I came here, all I wanted to do was make myself powerful financially. We didn’t just come here for ourselves. I needed a way to make more money to afford my own life and still help family members.”
Her talent as a chef is apparent in her richly spiced chicken stew known as doro wot, in her lamb awaze tibs fried with onion in clarified butter, and in her vegetarian combination of stewed vegetables, saucy split peas, and stir-fried collard greens served on top of injera. Mengesha sources her spices directly from Ethiopia on trips home or through her family’s visits. And ever since moving to a different space in 2017, which was permitted for a wine and beer license, she sells mes (also known as tej)—a honey mead served in traditional vase-shaped berele glasses with small wide-lipped mouths—alongside wine and beer.
Queen of Sheba is most well-known for its kitfo, a dish of raw lean beef chopped and seasoned with butter, herbs, and paprika. “We don’t buy our meat from Restaurant Depot or meat that’s been frozen or stored, we get it from the slaughterhouse on Rowena,” Mengesha says. Every Thursday, she receives a whole cow’s worth of beef and uses it throughout the week. And every Thursday evening, her devoted customers—in this case, mostly Ethiopian—come in for her special kitfo. Among them are Yvette and Russell Platoff, the chef-owners of Aunt Yvette’s Kitchen, a popular nine-month-old Ethiopian restaurant in Eagle Rock.
American diners, a growing faction of Queen of Sheba’s customer base, favor Mengesha’s doro wot and vegetable combination but are less accustomed to kitfo. Meanwhile, since civil war broke out in Mengesha’s home region of Tigray in 2020, her Ethiopian clientele has declined.
Mengesha says she received the full support of Inglewood’s Ethiopian community when she opened the restaurant 12 years ago. Back then, the majority of Ethiopians in Los Angeles were living in Fairfax (where established Ethiopian restaurants such as Meals by Genet, Messob, and Lalibela reside), but the rent in the area was rising, causing many to migrate to Inglewood. “When there is a group of Ethiopians living on one block, everybody wants to move in because we have a very tight community,” she says, adding, “90% of Ethiopians know each other in this town.” Still, Tigrayans, who share a language (Tigrinya) with Eritreans and not the rest of Ethiopia, where Amharic is spoken, are the minority of the population. When the fighting between tribes began back home, a lot of Ethiopians from different ethnic groups started to boycott Mengesha’s restaurant. “Every person that came from [Tigray] that was living outside of Ethiopia was going through a depression for those three years,” she says.
In September of 2020, two months before the start of the Tigray War, SoFi Stadium, home of the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, arrived in Inglewood, simultaneously gentrifying the neighborhood and serving as Queen of Sheba’s saving grace. “I was lucky enough that when the stadium started building, a lot of Americans started coming, so they replaced the customers I was losing,” says Mengesha. “I have less people for the kitfo on Thursdays, so now I only get one cow [instead of two], but I’m still okay because I get to experience and meet different types of people.” Since SoFi’s inception, The Rolling Stones, Taylor Swift, and blink-182 have all performed at the stadium, bringing masses of fans to the area.
“There were condos selling for $90,000, and I didn’t buy one,” says Mengesha of pre-gentrified Inglewood. “Now, they’re like $600,000, and I can’t afford it.” Still, she welcomes the influx of diversity in the neighborhood and the increase in safety, both for her own quality of life and for the health of her business—especially in light of political strife within the Ethiopian community.
As Mengesha poured coffee for a five-top of middle-aged Eritrean men, a white father and his two teenage children, a large multi-generational family, and a few folks seated at the bar, she reflected on how supporting her loved ones remains her driving force. During the war in Tigray (which has since settled), she couldn’t talk to family back home or send money, as the government had disconnected phone access to the region. A year ago, a cousin of hers arrived in Los Angeles after acquiring a visa and traveling through 50+ countries to get to California, an excruciating effort to avoid having to fight in the war. Mengesha spent $25,000 to bring him to L.A. “I can’t forget about where I came from because I still have extended family who barely have food to eat,” she says. “You have no idea what Ethiopians and Eritreans and a lot of Africans go through to come to America.”
SoFi was only the first major development in a shifting Inglewood. Next month marks the grand opening of the Intuit Dome, a brand-new 18,000-seat arena for the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers situated only two-and-a-half miles away from Queen of Sheba. Bruno Mars will headline the inaugural event, and four years from now, the world’s most elite basketball players will compete on the court in honor of the 2028 Summer Olympics. Attendees of such major events would be remiss not to stop by Queen of Sheba beforehand to shovel injera slicked with berbere-spiced yemesir wot and tender strips of seasoned lamb into their mouths, followed by a strong cup of fresh coffee.
loved this so much! cannot wait to go here
Our family of nine absolutely love "Queen of Sheba"...great food, service & atmosphere❣️ Check her out....you will be happy you did❣️❣️❣️