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Habesha Lounge (801 NE Broadway, 284-4299) is either a party on top of an Ethiopian restaurant, or it's a bar that stumbled into a patio party. Loosely open Tuesdays through Saturdays, it mostly just comes into being when something's going on. Tuesday night is an open mic. Thursdays the room packs with indie-rock kids and comedians for a raucous karaoke night with deep tracks missing from most binders. The music shows—booked by the bar's sole employee, Brandon Nikola—range from underground to just plain weird, with the occasional high-profile Eternal Tapestry or Grammies record-release show. Their events only sometimes show up in newspapers, but are instead passed around on personal Facebook pages, a whisper campaign that sometimes reaches deafening levels. But if someone texts you to say they're at Habesha, you know what you're in for: a packed party room that spills onto a two-level patio overlooking Northeast Broadway, with nearly all of its seating on the deck. Inside, sweat. Outside, cigarettes. Five vegetarian Ethiopian items are available from the restaurant downstairs; these are eaten almost exclusively before 10 pm. The bar itself has a mere three taps and the liquor cabinet of an eccentric homeowner, a bare-bones list of standards supplemented with Fernet-Branca, nicer-than-average vermouth and Disaronno. The room is decorated equally sparsely and idiosyncratically, with a smattering of ceiling-hung tree slices and a 5-foot-tall picture of JFK hobnobbing with Haile Selassie. In the Year of the Pop-Up™®, when every restaurant from Toro Bravo to Ned Ludd is showing up with event spaces custom-made for "parties" that cost $100, Habesha is a beautiful throwback to the days when such things were actually improvised, rather than meticulously crafted by PR teams.
WWeek 2015