Alem Ethiopian Village
Restaurant, Bar
Hours
Profile
$$ - average
Ethiopian/Eritrean
Ethiopian food
A wonderful restaurant that serves traditional Ethiopian food. Forget the utensils, as Alem encourages patrons to dine in the traditional Ethiopian manner, using your hands. You use injera, a pancake like sourdough flat bread, to scoop up your food.
All vegetarian dishes, including: lentils, split peas, collard greens, potatoes, chick peas, potatoes, cabbage, and more, are vegan as well. Note that some of the wines contain honey, but the homemade Ethiopian tea does not. The staff is familiar with what vegan means and even has a "vegan-friendly food" sign in the window.
Alem features a full bar and is completely smoke-free. They have a few traditional Ethiopian low-standing basket-type tables but the dining room is mostly "regular" tables, which are covered with Ethiopian rugs and decorations.
Price ranges from $5.50-$8.50 for lunch and $5.50-$12.00 for dinner. They offer a small vegetarian combo platter including about 4-5 items, and a large vegetarian platter that features all 8 vegetarian items on the menu.
#15 bus to Water Street, walk east a few blocks.
- Kid-Friendly
- Large Group-Friendly
- Quiet
Added by Felisha.Anne on Sep 20 08 (updated Dec 27 08)
Reviews
Becoming one of my favorite local restaurants the vegetarian menu is well appointed and tasty. I didn't realize that beans and peas could be a comfort food until I started dining here. The service is excellent. I just think that the decor could use a bit of sprucing up. Other than that you can't go wrong here.
I have been trying to get to this restaurant for a few months and boy am I glad I finally made it. This has got to be my all-time favorite Ethiopian restaurant. The food was not only extremely flavorful and well-priced, but they had more vegetarian selections than I've ever seen in any other Ethiopian restaurant.
My mother and I shared the large combo platter for $15.95. It was enough food for two people, but I'm greedy so I wouldn't be opposed to getting the combo for 2 for $26.25. This platter had about 9 different items on it and all of them were good. The yemisir wot (lentils) and gomen (collards) were especially good but I was astoundingly impressed with the shimbra asa, which is a specialty that is not always featured. It's a spicy chickpea dough cooked to look like a thick fish stew. It was part of the combo platter but is also offered as its own main dish.
We also shared an order of sambusa (lentil and onion-filled fried roll). My mom really enjoyed it but I thought it could benefit from a sauce and would have preferred the filling to be a smooth paste, versus whole lentils.
We also had the Ethiopian tea, which was a delicious homemade tea, and not a Lipton teabag, as I've seen in other Ethiopian restaurants.