Cottage House Ethiopian Cuisine

Ethiopian cuisine is organized around the injera, the large spongy sourdough flatbread made from the teff grain that is indigenous to the Ethiopian highlands. The injera serves as both plate and utensil: the stews and dishes that make up the Ethiopian meal are placed on top of the injera, and the diners tear off pieces of the bread and use them to scoop the dishes. The communal format, where multiple people share from the same large piece of injera spread with several preparations, is the social structure that Ethiopian food establishes around the table.

The Washington, DC metropolitan area has the largest Ethiopian diaspora population in the United States, centered in the Adams Morgan and U Street neighborhoods but spread across the metro area. The presence of an Ethiopian restaurant in Georgetown at 1529 Wisconsin Avenue NW serves both the Georgetown community and the broader DC population who want to eat Ethiopian food in a different neighborhood from the primary Ethiopian restaurant concentration.

The stew preparations that Ethiopian cooking centers on, called wat in Amharic, cover the range from the berbere-spiced chicken stew called doro wat, which is the most celebrated preparation in the Ethiopian culinary tradition and which is slow-cooked for hours with whole hardboiled eggs added at the end, through the red lentil stew called misir wat, the split yellow lentils called kik alicha in a milder turmeric and ginger preparation, and the vegetable preparations of potatoes, green beans, and beets that the vegetarian platter combines. The vegetarian platter, called the veggie combo in many Washington Ethiopian restaurants, is among the most ordered options because the Ethiopian spice tradition produces vegetable preparations that are as satisfying as the meat dishes rather than the compromise that vegetarian options often represent in other cuisines.

Cottage House at 1529 Wisconsin serves the lunch and dinner periods. Hours run from 11am most days and noon Sunday. The teff grain from which injera is made is nutritionally significant beyond its culinary function. Teff is high in iron, calcium, fiber, and protein relative to other cereal grains, and the fermentation process that produces injera’s characteristic sourness improves the bioavailability of these nutrients through the same mechanism that makes sourdough bread more digestible than unfermented bread. The result is a dietary staple that has sustained highland Ethiopian populations for millennia and that nutritional researchers have identified as particularly well-suited to plant-based diets. The vegetarian and vegan customer at Cottage House Ethiopian finds in the injera and the vegetarian stews a meal that is both culturally authentic and nutritionally complete in a way that vegetarian options in many other restaurant contexts are not. The upper Wisconsin Avenue address at 1529 is between the Dumbarton Street intersection and the Glover Park neighborhood boundary.