Reading without Tutu’s Ethiopian Table now seems unthinkable. This year marks the 20th anniversary for the popular menu of meat and vegetarian stews, served with the Ethiopian traditional pancake, injera.

Now based in Palmer Park Lodge, next to the hugely popular play area and just off Wokingham Road, the café is a dream come true for Tutu Melaku. It’s a real meeting point: families can pop in for snacks, east Reading residents can enjoy tea and cake, while community groups – including poets and singers – have made it a second home. No wonder it has rave reviews on Tripadvisor. 

That’s not all that Tutu does: her sauces can be bought for home cooking, and they can be found in pantries the world over as people buy them for presents as well as for themselves, while her mobile catering truck means she can pop up at festivals or attend company functions, parties and weddings.  

“My food is not just staying in Reading, it’s going to Scotland, to Aberdeen, to Leeds, to Birmingham,” she says, adding that she hopes that one day her sauces will be on sale in shops.

There is one thing that may surprise people. Despite Tutu’s pride in the cuisine of her home country, her core clientele isn’t from the African nation. 

“There are a very small number of people from Ethiopia in Reading, especially when I opened. It’s not a big community here. London? Definitely. Reading is a very multi-cultural town, and everybody welcomes everybody from different places. It is a beautiful place to live because everybody wants to know who you are, everybody welcomes you, everybody loves you and wants to know more about you. I’ve never felt like I’m an outsider.”

The journey to a successful business has been a long one, and it all started in her own kitchen. 

Originally from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, she found herself living and working in Reading, often offering some African hospitality to friends she made here: “I’m passionate about cooking and when I invited people to my house, they loved my food. Someone suggested that I should start a business: I’d never thought about it.”

Like all good superheroes, she had a double life: when she started Tutu’s Ethiopian Table, she was a childminder during the day and catering for parties, meetings and birthdays the rest of the time. That initial success led her to realise there was a business to be had. There was just one problem: “When you are a childminder, you don’t make a lot of money. I loved the job, and it suited me as my kids were young.”

Tutu needed an alternative solution and set upon trying to find a kitchen to hire, trying pubs but finding closed doors. Forget the school of hard knocks: this was the pubs and restaurants of hard door knocking.

She says: “I remember one who just said, ‘How dare you come and ask this question’.

“Some asked why and I told them that this is my passion, and I know I didn’t have the money to do it.”

However, a conversation at RISC that had initially seemed fruitless came good. Tutu had initially been told that the charity, which runs the Global Café in London Street, wouldn’t take her in, but was later invited to speak to the trustees about her vision for using their kitchens to bring her food to a wider audience. 

“They asked me to come in and have a meeting with me, asked me a lot of questions and wanted to know about me as a person as well. After a week they said they were happy to have me,” she recalls. “When we did the launch, we had 144 people turn up.

“I remember the queue was out in the streets, reaching the traffic lights. It was a big, big, big launch … and that’s where the journey started.”

She was there for 12 years, winning awards such as a Pride of Reading Award, but yearned for her own space. When the opportunity came to take on the cafe at Palmer Park, she leapt into action and convinced Reading Borough Council that she was the best person to take on the lease.

“When I mentioned that I was going to move to Palmer Park I think most of my friends thought I was crazy,” she laughs. “They said I was already established in RISC, and it would be hard to make money. I said to them I’m not there yet, but when I am it will be a different story.”

The launch, in 2019, saw crowds once again flock to support Tutu. The then borough mayor, Debs Edwards, cut the ribbon and among the guests was the Ethiopian High Commission's Deputy Head of Mission, Ababi Demissie. At the ceremony, he endorsed her as a cultural ambassador for the country, adding that he hoped her success will serve as an example and catalyst for even more Ethiopians to contribute towards building a better Ethiopia and promote Ethiopia’s cultural heritage through various endeavours.

That early success was then followed by the lockdowns caused by Covid-19, with the hospitality industry particularly affected. 

“We celebrated our first anniversary and then we had to shut down. I had a panic attack because I didn’t know what to do, and was worried I’d lose the cafe, and that would be the end of me. But you know what? My community, they said you are not going to close down. We’re going to come and have takeaway food,” she says. 

“The people around me saved this place: This is not just a business; Tutu’s is more than that and that’s why it’s successful. If you focus on having to make money, that's not going to work. You have to learn how to serve your people.”

That includes seeing the Palmer Park venue host wedding and birthday parties, and a Community Festival. Tutu feels that this means it’s not a café, but a family, and this feeds back into how Tutu runs things. 

“I look after everybody who walks into this cafe,” she says. “Because I do, you make them special and you remember who they are; you remember the coffee, the food and how they like it. Some people, you know, like their food on the plate, some like small dishes and different bowls. 

“I remember one lady saying that coming to me is like going to her mum’s every Sunday for a roast. That’s a big statement to make. If I can make people feel like that I think my job is done.”

To mark the 20th anniversary of Tutu’s Ethiopian Table, several events are being planned. Among the early initiatives is a commemorative mug that people can purchase, and customers are being invited to complete postcard-sized greetings that will eventually form a massive birthday card.

It will culminate in an event this autumn. “We don’t know exactly what the party looks like, we have so many ideas and I want people to give me theirs. I want them to share their memories about the café and RISC, tell me how they met me, and what it means to them. 

“Send me a letter, draw a picture, so I can keep it and show my grandchildren.”

Whatever happens, with her community joining her around the table and breaking injera (Ethiopian pancake) together, the celebration will be a day that makes Reading proud.

For more on Tutu’s Ethiopian Table, log on to: https://tutus-ethiopian-table.com. Her next open mic event will be from 6.30pm on Friday, 10 April. 

Tutu’s charity, Tutu’s Fund for the Future, helps orphaned and vulnerable children in Ethiopia attend school and develop their potential. Run in partnership with Together We Learn, it focuses on education projects in schools and the sponsorship of vulnerable children. For more details, or to donate to the fund, log on to: https://twlethiopia.org/tutus-fund-for-the-future/