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| - The food here is some of the best Ethiopian I have tried - compared to other Ethiopian in Charlotte that I know, I much prefer it to Meskerem. I highly recommend the Queen Sheba combo, it easily feeds two people and has lamb, chicken and about three lentil and two veg dishes.
I cannot really recommend the Tej (honey wine). It had a very strong fermenty flavor, and our friends who had had it before elsewhere said it usually tasted better. But I enjoyed trying it just for the experience.
Now as for the service: That was rather an awkward experience. The waitress kept trying to dissuade us from the combo we were trying to order, and in the end said that we should order that combo, a different combo AND another individual dish, so that we could try the most popular dishes. Combos, she said would feed one to two people depending on their appetite. Once again, there were two of us eating one combo and we had another large portion left to take home. The waitress kept being a little pushy about ordering other things throughout the meal and even after we had paid. But apart from that, she was very nice. Update: Service during a subsequent visit was very nice more... quietly helpful!
I highly recommend ordering coffee - it is 5 dollars a person, but one of the owners roasted previously unroasted coffee beans (which I hadn't actually seen before) for us right there in the restaurant, ground them, and brewed coffee over a little camp stove in traditional Ethiopian/Eritrean clay pots while we sat on little stools watching and chatting with the owner about how she came to the US and how her family adapted to the life there. What a fun experience!
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