City guide
The Best Ethiopian Restaurants in Maryland
9 min read · Updated August 2026
From Silver Spring's Georgia Avenue corridor to Baltimore, where to find the doro wat, kitfo and vegan beyaynetu worth the drive.
Where Maryland's Ethiopian food actually lives
Maryland's Ethiopian dining is concentrated along Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring and around Takoma Park, with a second cluster in Baltimore's Charles North. Georgia Avenue is where you go for a full beyaynetu spread; Takoma leans toward smaller kitchens and coffee-forward rooms.
What to order the first time
Order a beyaynetu — the fasting combination — before anything else. It gives you shiro, misir, gomen, atkilt and tikil gomen on one platter, and it is the fastest way to judge a kitchen's injera and spicing. Follow it with doro wat on a second visit, which is the dish kitchens compete on.
Reading the room
A kitchen fermenting its own injera will usually tell you. Ask whether the injera is 100% teff or a blend — neither is wrong, but the answer tells you how the kitchen thinks. A restaurant that offers a coffee ceremony after dinner is signalling that it expects you to stay.