They were asleep when the fire began.
On the morning of Sept. 22, flames sucked the ceiling tiles of Jano Ethiopian Restaurant and Lounge into the dining room floor and licked the walls black. About 10 miles west, the eatery’s owners began waking up for church. They didn’t hear about the flames rising at 9:30 a.m., the 28 firefighters called to the scene at 9:40, the roof collapsing, the six buildings burning, the 200 firefighters downtown by 10 a.m.
When owner Fikremariam Worku learned of the blaze, he thought it was a nightmare. After 20 years of turning a passion project into a financial lifeline for his family, it was all over.
“Your whole world turns upside down,” Worku said. “You can see your dream burning in front of you.”
In the week and a half since the five-alarm fire burned, snarling traffic on the day of an Orioles home game and suspending the MTA light rail, Worku’s life has changed. He and wife Eskedar “Mimi” Abawa — who co-owned Jano and Docs Famous Wings — lost both their businesses, the last in a series of restaurant ventures the pair has tried to profit from since Worku was granted political asylum in the United States around 2004.
Over the years, they invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into sustaining the building and buoying the restaurant — an enterprise that paid for three kids’ high school educations, a house in Baltimore County and money to be sent overseas for Ethiopian relatives fleeing violence. But chasing prosperity in this industry has never been easy for the self-described former refugees who, after decades of having to reinvent themselves, are being forced yet again to start over.
Charred and yellow artwork collected by Abawa still sits in the restaurant. Now a cavern of soot filled with about a foot of water from fire hoses, Jano is boarded up and scheduled for demolition. The investigation into the fire is ongoing, according to John Marsh, a spokesman for the Baltimore City Fire Department. He added that fires of this size are rare, with the last “five-alarm” blaze being three years ago.
Abawa’s feet slosh through the former lounge area on a visit to the building, where she points out a painting of an Ethiopian woman harvesting teff grain for injera, a spongelike bread she uses to transfer some of her favorite foods like misir wat, or Ethiopian red lentils, and doro wat, a spicy chicken stew, into her mouth. “You can’t find this in Baltimore,” she said of the now-stained image, no larger than a laptop, drawn on animal skin.
“It’s from home. We couldn’t figure how to hang it on the wall,” she said. To keep the delicate picture symmetrical with the restaurant’s dozens of tables and wooden sculptures, now floating in a sea of rotted drywall, she had to put holes in the sides and tie it to a frame.
It’s one of many images she brought from Ethiopia to remind her why she first opened a restaurant. Abawa denies being “passionate” about cooking, instead considering it “something you do to live.” But if you ask her about butter, which she spices with coriander and cardamom to clarify sauces, or coffee, which she prepared for her teacher mother in a daily ceremony from the age of 12, you’ll see the truth in her smile.
“I love when people enjoy anything I do, like, here’s something that I love, something from me. … I feel like I’m eating it … Oh I love it. It’s so beautiful,” she said. On lunch breaks while working at Chase Bank, her first job in Baltimore after fleeing Ethiopia, she said the spices from her lunchbox prompted coworkers to walk over aghast. “I was like, oh, this is something different [for them] that I’m eating.”
Worku also beams over the cooking. “She was always a hit,” he said, adding that “everybody tipped almost double” at the restaurant and they “couldn’t believe it was so cheap.”
But they needed more than spiced butter to keep up.
Neither Worku nor Abawa had ever opened an eatery. Abawa was taken with the concept after watching coworkers try her cooking. Around 2015, Worku left his job as a case manager for the International Rescue Committee, one of the first positions he had in Baltimore that wasn’t operating a 7-Eleven or waiting on guests at a hotel. He had come to the U.S with a master’s in social work, having studied in India and Europe and trained for 25 years in Africa before being forced to leave his home due to his advocacy for human rights.
He claims to have helped up to 9,000 refugees in Baltimore and believes it was part of a calling. He refers to Jano as part of a “second chapter.” “My wife couldn’t do it by herself,” he said.
Worku didn’t give up the advocacy, he said, hiring some of his former refugee clients and members of the local Ethiopian church to help the restaurant on South Eutaw Street. But people didn’t buy in. Customers were scarce and predominantly Ethiopians looking to show support. The location they chose downtown, hoping it would be a hotspot for foot traffic, turned out to be vacant in the day and bustling around midnight.
“I really couldn’t figure it out,” he said, citing a dearth of Ethiopian people in Baltimore compared to Silver Spring and Washington, D.C, which has the largest population of Ethiopians in the United States. A fraction of those thousands of people are scattered around Charm City. Worku noted the numbers are growing — they just didn’t eat at his restaurant, he said, laughing.
It became a marketing issue, he said, so the business pivoted to entertain the late-night crowds looking for a spot to drink for cheap around the neighboring nightlife. Next door to Jano is The Goddess Gentlemen’s Club, Lombard’s Liquor Store and a Thai restaurant, Thai Elephant Wok, which suffered moderate damage. None of the business owners responded to requests for comment.
The shift in direction was disappointing — Abawa’s blend of Berbere spices were put away in favor of other chefs’ chicken wings for more easy to eat club foods. People became used to seeing Abawa behind the bar, whipping up $6 cocktails. The changes inspired Worku to open the neighboring wing shop, but he said it “never made a penny.”
A former employee of Jano, John Swan, who brought in DJs and promoted the lounge among local artists for seven years, said the club side became “bigger than the Ethiopian food … bigger than we ever thought it would be.” People could drink all night, with a small staff of bottle girls, security and two cooks in the kitchen.
The former tenants of the space already had a reputation as a bar, which Abawa said helped bring in the crowd. “We have to feed our kids and everything, so we just keep doing more,” she said. Over time, some problems emerged: The business incurred multiple liquor license violations, including up to $2,000 fines for failed sanitation inspections and selling liquor to minors.
But in the last six months, Worku said they were trying to bring back Jano’s roots. “I really wanted to go back to [working in] the day time,” Abawa said. A new downstairs space, renovated by the pair in the last three years, inspired them to put efforts back into what they loved, even conjuring plans for a vegetarian and vegan addition.
Worku said the business was also struggling to pay back a more-than-$200,000 small business loan, taken out to help the eatery survive COVID-19. At that time, he said, “we just prayed for a conference [at the convention center across the street].”
He appeared far less concerned about the future than Abawa, who struggled Friday to survey the restaurant’s damage. Warped walls had moved the refrigerator farther into the dining area and many of the hand-carved wooden plaques — a symbol of the Ethiopian church — were left submerged underwater and charred ceiling lamps.
If the darkness or the stench of burning rubber scared him, Worku didn’t show it. He ran up the decaying stairs to get a look at the second floor’s crumbled roof, revealing a brighter sky.
“We came here with nothing and we can make it again,” he said.