Selam, Owner Haile Gersus's Eritrean and Ethiopian on 15th and U Street

[JLK]

Anyone been to Selam on 15th and U Street?

May 11, 2007 - "Selam is Getting into the Groove" by Fritz Hahn on washingtonpost.com

[DonRocks]

I've always wondered if "Selam" was the same word as "Salaam" ("Welcome") in Hindi, e.g., "Salaam Bombay!" and I learned about three minutes ago that it is not; "Selam" is Lucy's baby! (Sort of - the word also means "peace," and may indeed be rooted to the Hindi "Salaam" - it wouldn't take much research to find out - thirty years ago, it would have been a trip to the library, hoping you remember the Dewey Decimal System (I can hear it now: "The *what*, dad?"); now, it's a two-minute Google search.)

Ethiopia, perhaps Eritrea, is the cradle of known human civilization, which explains why two of our area's Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants are named Lucy and Selam.

Little Selam was only 3 years old, and she lived 3.3 million years (132,000 generations) ago - those numbers, taken together, boggle the mind; what boggles the mind even more is that she lived so recently - the time that has passed since Selam was toddling around Ethiopia represents less than 1/4000th of the age of the universe. That was one seriously big bang.

Selam is supposedly open until 9PM six nights a week, but Fritz Hahn implied, long ago, that it was a late-night lounge, and a quick search says that it's open tonight (Wednesday) until 2AM: