Zed's Ethiopean Cuisine, Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

After struggling with old office and cell numbers from another state and then an old cell number from my "early D.C. phase," my friend Isha finally tracked me down this evening to announce that she was in town and wanted to go to dinner "someplace different," courtesy of her office expense account. That can be a difficult assignment when dealing with an international businesswoman who has lived all over the place, but I know her tastes when she lived in Tulsa were not particularly adventurous, and I figured her London experiences were not much different, so, I picked an Ethiopean place. I was right; the Ethiopean cuisine was a new experience for her and she actually liked it.

Now, Washington has a plethora of good—and even excellent—Ethiopean restaurants, some of which have big followings. I wanted things to be "just so" for Isha, though, which meant we had to go to Georgetown to Zed's Ethiopean Cuisine. Zed's is one of the better known Ethiopean places in D.C., largely because of their fine food and excellent service, but also because they are alleged to be the only place the Ethiopean Embassy will use to cater their formal embassy events. What I particularly like about Zed's is their elegance; they seem to be the only "white tablecloth" Ethiopean restaurant in town.

We started with two appetizers we shared, kaisa and shrimp tibbs. The kaisa is a soft, traditional, cottage-type cheese enriched with butter and herbs; the shrimp tibbs are pieces of shrimp with sauteed onions, red pepper, and garlic in a tomatoey sauce; both of these appetizers are eaten with the fingers with pieces of Ethiopean injera bread.

Since this was Isha's first visit to an Ethiopean establishment, I thought the best thing to do would be to order sampler plates, giving her a broad variety of tastes and flavors. We ordered one beef and chicken sampler and one vegetarian sampler. They all came on one big injera-lined platter for the whole table to share. I'm not sure what everything was on the platter, but it appeared that we had a chicken and hard boiled egg doro watt, several beef stews including kaey watt, alicha, and segana gomen; chopped collard greens with garlic, a delicious cabbage and carrot tikile gomen, a stew of green beans, cauliflower, and carrots, a chickpea puree, and a few other things I can't recall. They also brought us a basket of rolled up pieces of injera which we could use to pick up and eat our food.

We washed down our food with big cans of Tusker Beer from Kenya, which was a pleasant lager.

Unusually for an Ethiopean restaurant, Zed's offers Italian style desserts. While Ethiopia was one of the few African countries that was not colonized by European powers in the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a brief period in the very late 19th centiry when Italy had a presence in Ethiopia in the area known as Eritrea. Isha had a cappuccino tartufo (ice cream ball) and I had a piece of grandmother cake, which was a lemon tart-like cake; they also had profiteroles and gelatos on the menu.

As expected, we had a very pleasant evening at Zed's. The food was excellent and the service was gracious, efficient, and professional. Zed's is a great place for Ethiopean "first-timers" as well as for those seeking a more elegant Ethiopean experience. Yes, it's a little more expensive than the places in Adams-Morgan or on U Street, but this is Georgetown and I think Zed's continues to be worth the money.