location_onAbebech, 5320 Georgia Ave., NW
A top-notch, scratch-made beef lasagna, enriched with béchamel and reminiscent of something served at an old-fashioned Brooklyn Italian place, is prepared in a tiny, frankincense-choked cafe on upper Georgia Avenue, to the tune of mellifluous Ethiopian pop.
This might seem incongruous, but it wouldn’t if you knew Emebet Demissie. The nurse turned chef lived in Rome for ten years and learned the recipe from a 92-year-old woman she cared for.
Now Demissie owns Abebech, a modest, exemplary Ethiopian restaurant in Brightwood Park that she named after her mother. It’s been a long time coming. Demissie grew up helping her parents in their Addis Ababa restaurant and held onto the dream of opening her own place through her years in Italy and her arrival in the US, where she’s since spent two decades.
“I came first to New York, so I was looking into the Culinary Institute of America,” Demissie says. “But I said, ‘Let me go into nursing and then I will pick up my passion later on.’ ”
Eventually, she became the wellness director at an assisted-living complex in Maryland. “But still I enjoyed coming to Ethiopian restaurants,” Demissie says, “and still I was looking into, in the back of my mind, opening a small, cozy place like this.”
The day finally came in March, when she learned that the cafe Gueny’s was closing. She decided to open a new Ethiopian cafe in its stead—but with her own approach. Although the potent combination of Ethiopian frankincense and sizzling onions in the tiny space is lethal for tear ducts, I found myself coming back three times in one month—once for every meal of the day—and leaving with a lentil sambusa for the road every time.
Italian preparations are common in Ethiopian cooking, a legacy of Italy’s colonial forays into East Africa. You can find a tasty espresso or decent spaghetti at many Ethiopian restaurants—and any Eritrean one—in Washington. But Demissie takes this a step further. Here, along with lasagna (inquire ahead of time for availability) you can find spaghetti Bolognese, tomato-basil pasta, and ciabatta panini filled with kitfo (mitmita-seasoned ground beef, sautéed or raw), or awaze tibs with soft white cheese. On the side is your typical green salad, but turned up to 11—it’s practically marinated in a peppery vinaigrette and tossed with minced jalapeños.
Yet the single best thing I ate at Abebech wasn’t Italian. Demissie’s seven-veggie platter—in a city full of great Ethiopian veggie combos—stands out. A rotating cast of the usual suspects is here: spicy lentil stew; goldenrod-colored split-pea stew; sweet, earthy beets and collards; pleasantly overcooked string beans, carrots, and cabbage; and a thicker-than-usual shiro (chickpea-flour stew).
Breakfast, served from 8 am on weekdays, is hearty. The lumberjack combination plate of firfir (seasoned, shredded injera), kinche (sautéed cracked wheat), chechebsa (thick flatbread tossed in clarified butter), and scrambled eggs, along with a cup of coffee and warm, bluesy Ethiopian ballads, could sustain anyone—gastronomically and spiritually—until well into the afternoon.
This article appears in the June 2025 issue of Washingtonian.
