The Story Behind Habesha Ethio Eritrean Restaurant
Bashat Gutama endured a lot to bring us this welcoming corner of the Des Moines culinary landscape.
This post continues the story I began in my review of Habesha Ethio Eritrean Restaurant. The email was getting long, and I didn’t want Bashat Gutama’s journey to be the part that got trimmed. Here, she tells how she came to the United States—and how that path led her to this welcoming little spot on Merle Hay Road.
I never identify myself as a food writer when I go out to dine, as I do not want special treatment. But after lunch, and after my friend Jeanne and I toured the little Ethiopian grocery store a few doors down, Jeanne (a journalist by trade) said, “Aren’t you dying know her story?”
Of course I was.
We went back into the shop, and I told Gutama that I was a food journalist, and I planned to write an article about her restaurant. I asked if she would share her background. She seemed happy and comfortable doing so.
Jeanne and I listened at length as Gutama recounted her journey. There were moments when Bashat spoke with a quiet, woman-to-woman openness that felt less like an interview and more like three lives briefly in conversation. She knew I was there as a journalist, of course, but a few parts of her story felt offered for our shared understanding, not for publication. I’ve held those back out of respect.
Gutama’s journey to Des Moines began at a refugee camp in Kenya, where she arrived after instability in her own country. She lived there alone, without family, in a desert camp marked with searing heat and food and water shortages—for eight years. She had been forced to leave her own three young children behind.
Finally, in 2010, her partner, whom she met in the camp, was able to secure a visa for Canada, the United States, or Australia. He urged Australia; she held fast to the U.S. That is where she landed, gravely ill after childbirth and carrying her newborn.
During her first year in the U.S., in Arizona and separated from her partner, she lived in a shelter: one room, a bed, and a baby bassinet beside her. She worked housekeeping shifts for $7.25 an hour, catching the early bus to work and returning to the same small room to sleep with her infant at arm’s reach.
Desperate to bring her three other children to the U.S., she was advised by her caseworker that the only path forward was to reunite with the partner she had emigrated with; he alone possessed the requirements needed for getting the children to the U.S. She returned to him briefly. No progress was made, except that she became pregnant once again.
Eventually, on her own again, she accepted the invitation of a Somali-born friend to come to Des Moines. She and her two children slept on her friend’s floor while she worked at the Goodwill, then later at Oakridge. In time, she enrolled at DMACC, earned her commercial driver’s license, and began driving for DART.
At last, the three children she’d had to leave behind were able to join her in the United States.
She took over the Ethiopian grocery store, and later, just last spring, she opened Habesha.
And her current husband? “We’ve known each other from a long time ago. We saw each other on Facebook, and …”
And here they are.