Samad Ahmadi put two years into transforming his Edgewater auto garage into Paradise, the Middle Eastern restaurant that served as a showcase for his eye-popping, idiosyncratic outsider art. Last year he decided to get out of the restaurant business, but he wanted to preserve his vision, a riot of mosaics and bric-a-brac. He turned to his neighbor, Emebet Afework, former owner of Abyssinia Market a few doors down Broadway, who agreed to leave it mostly untouched. Afework had long wanted to get into the restaurant biz—her uncle owned Ethio Cafe, and her market traded in Ethiopian spices. In January she and her husband, Kaleb Gebremariam, reopened Paradise as Green Village Restaurant, unique not just in its decor but in its dual offerings of Ethiopian and Middle Eastern cuisine. It’s not really such a strange combination, Afework says. After all, Ethiopia and Eritrea are just across the Red Sea from Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
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Working inside a shingled cooking area at the front of the restaurant, Afework turns out all the standards with a sure hand—falafel, baba ghanoush, ful, tabouleh, and kebabs on the Middle Eastern side of the menu, wats, tibs, and kitfo on the Ethiopian side. We found the falafel a touch dry, but a generous portion of Jerusalem salad was very fresh, redolent of mint and parsley. Beef tibs were flavorful if chewy, but the standout was lamb kebabs, so moist and perfectly seasoned that we recommended them to a couple of curious passersby we ran into on the way out. Green Village also offers a range of modestly priced combo plates served with salad, hummus, and rice or salad and injera—for $13.95 the vegetarian sampler gets you five Ethiopian dishes and hummus and baba. Service is gracious, and the reasonable check comes in a little decorated box. The place is permanently BYO; the upstairs balcony functions as a private space that would make a trippy setting for a party. —Kate Schmidt
We had conspicuously overordered—an injera-lined platter each of yebeg alicha (lamb stew), lega tibs (a red beef stew), lamb tibs, and a veggie combo—but at the end of our meal at Blue Nile Ethiopian restaurant we couldn’t stop rooting through the remains to pick out the toothy, caramelized whole cloves of garlic buried there. The buttery pureed red lentils in the veggie combo answered my yen for spiciness; the lega tibs, oily and red, and yebeg alicha, greenish and creamier, were both cooked in kebe, butter simmered with onion, garlic, ginger, cardamom, turmeric, and cumin. Owner Liknesh Tareke tells me that wats cooked with the fiery hot pepper paste berbere are the most popular, as well as the spiciest, items on her menu; I’d go back to try them with a tiny cup of powerful Ethiopian coffee. As we packed up our comically high stack of boxed-up leftovers and settled the comically small bill, my friend and I caught each other eyeing the ruins of the lega tibs for a last undiscovered bit of garlic. BYO. —Tasneem Paghdiwala
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