2008 Fall Dining Guide
By Tom Sietsema
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, Oct. 12, 2008

The difference between this Ethiopian restaurant and so many others is not just its suburban Arlington location. This establishment, named for owner Meaza Zemedu, is 7,000 square feet of dining room, banquet room, food store and butcher shop, with a stage for live music on weekends and walls decorated with a history lesson: portraits of Ethiopian emperors going back to the 1800s, painted on lambskins. The cooking aims higher, too. The most obvious example is the grain that goes into the premium injera, the slightly sour crepe that doubles as an eating utensil. The stuff is made right here, with the expensive Ethiopian grain known as teff rather than mere white flour. The treat adds just a dollar more to your meal, so be sure to spring for it. Use the injera to scoop up the "special vegi combo," a kaleidoscope of three lentil dishes: potatoes ignited with jalapeos, garlicky collard greens and deep yellow cabbage served together on a hubcap-sized platter. Or maybe the lamb tibs: cubes of lean meat sauteed with onion, garlic and ginger. Some like it hot, and rare, and for them there is raw ground beef blended with clarified butter, cardamom and mitmita, the blazing, brick-colored blend of chili peppers, black caraway, cloves and more. Yeow! And wow. The kitchen not only does the usual Ethiopian recipes well, but it adds beef cubes cooked in beef fat with onions, garlic and basil; and tilapia, which gets chopped into pieces and flavored with paprika, ginger and garlic. But you might not hear about them from the willing but halting servers who seem out of sync with the nightclubby setting.