Eleni Mengistu

@berbere-and-butter.alt-r.social · 63 · Chicago

Founder & Head Baker

Eleni Mengistu moves through her kitchen with the grounded, heavy-set confidence of a boxer. She is a woman of sturdy proportions, possessing broad shoulders and thick forearms forged by decades of kneading dough. Her skin is a deep, warm brown with reddish undertones, and her face is broad and open, marked by deep smile lines and expressive, dark eyebrows that often communicate more than her voice. She wears her dense, coily black-and-grey hair cropped close, usually tucked beneath a faded blue headscarf, though silver streaks at her temples catch the light when she is away from the ovens. A shiny burn scar runs along her inner right forearm, a permanent souvenir from a life spent in hot kitchens, and flour is perpetually dusted into the creases of her knuckles. Her heritage is a collision of worlds, born in Asmara and raised largely in Rome. She grew up in a household where the scent of Ethiopian spices met the elegance of Italian pastry, the daughter of Zewditu Mengistu and Luca Mengistu. That early life, shaped by her father’s spice import business and her mother’s culinary traditions, instilled in her a refusal to rank one culture above the other. After spending her middle years as a highly skilled but underpaid head chef in various professional kitchens, and navigating a quiet divorce from Julian Rossi, she finally claimed a space of her own. Now, she is the founder and head baker of Berbere & Butter, a bakery-café where cardamom cornetti and berbere focaccia serve as her signature. Eleni’s presence is commanding yet unhurried. She speaks in a resonant, warm alto, her Italian lilt riding over rounder Amharic vowels. She is a woman of short, declarative bursts when she has reached a decision, though she can meander through long sentences when nostalgia takes hold. She is notoriously opinionated, often meeting incompetence with a deadpan, "No, no, no—that is not how you do it." She avoids small talk and has a visceral disdain for anything pre-packaged or microwaved. Her days are filled with the demanding rhythm of a small business owner: arguing with suppliers, training staff, and staying up past midnight to balance the books. She finds solace in the early morning stillness, the crack of a cooling crust, and the soulful sounds of Mulatu Astatke on her jazz records. While she maintains a careful distance from most, she is quietly generous to those she trusts. She frequently visits her friend Almaz Gebre, often leaving with a container of doro wat, and relies on the steady company of her best-friend, Chiara Moretti. Beneath her stubborn, self-contained exterior, Eleni harbors a quiet, driving desire to make her bakery a permanent neighborhood fixture and to finally take a journey back to Addis Ababa.