Kezira Cafe

This place was amazing! From the moment we walked in, the cozy restaurant was filled with incredible aromas of dishes being cooked and served. This was only our second time having Ethiopian cuisine and our waitress was very helpful to explain the dishes and give us gluten free options. She even let us know that if we give her 24 hours notice, they can make gluten free injera bread for us… Can’t wait. We also enjoyed a lovely cup of traditional coffee, that they roast and grind on house, that was infused with ginger root… What a delicious treat!

Wow. Unbelievable!!! I love this place!!! They cooked so perfect! We ordered Combo #1 along with amazing injera!!! We will def come back again!!! Be beware you will use your hands to eat with, no forks!

Amazingly healthy and great tasting good. The service is so friendly with a warm atmosphere.
I can’t wait to go back!

This place is amazing! My wife and I go here almost every week for their delicious veggie combo. The staff is very friendly, the food is always fresh and the injera is so tasty.
If you like Ethiopian food, then this is the place to go in Columbia City!

Great food, really nice staff, very welcoming and helpful! First time I’ve ever had Ethiopian and I loved it. Definitely worth a visit!

Hands down the best Ethiopian food I’ve ever had! The food was fresh and you could tell made with lots of love. The service was welcoming and just lovely. My server Hilina showed me how to eat Ethiopian food properly. I highly recommend her! The atmosphere was so cozy and I felt transported into the heart of the culture. An overall great experience! If you’re looking for authentic fresh Ethiopian food look no further than Kezira!

The food was delicious. The waitress made great suggestions including the fish stew, so good! The environment is very laid back but classy, a nice dinner spot. Try the Ethiopia beer and coffee too!

I am Habesha. And this is the first worst experience I had in life. Worst customer service. And the foods were not cooked appropriately. We got wrong orders. Even the food what we got was not what we want and even didn’t eat it but they make us to pay. In the beginning they made Us move different tables to find the right size since they couldn’t figure out for our groups. The last and worst one was, while we were waiting our rides outside, the waiter called police to kick us away. I am very frustrated and shameful when I write this. Habesha people are known for respecting guests. Hopefully they will learn from this review.

We visited this place with another family. Everything was delicious. One our dishes was anTilapia entrée. It was cooked perfectly and spices were delicate.
We also tried the tea and coffee with ginger. I fell in love with the spiced tea.
Service was excellent, always with a smile. Totally worth the trip from the east side!

Amazing food, super friendly and helpful servers, great atmosphere. Must-​try! Get the yebeg wot (lamb)

This is my favorite place to eat Ethiopian! The food is delicious and healthy, the seasoning is perfect. Portions are great! Every time I take a new friend here to eat they want to eat it again and again! Great to introduce Ethiopian cuisine, for the first time to people who’ve never had as well! The ambiance and decorating is welcoming and beautiful! Always friendly customer service!

What an experience! I have eaten authentic Ethiopean food in many cities around the world, but this was the best: fresh, exquisitely plated, and presented in a timely fashion. The atmosphere just added to a memorable dinner. How might I add another star?

This review is long overdue! When visiting Seattle, we wanted to have some ethnic food but I’m vegetarian so our go to is usually middle eastern or Lebanese. Then we saw Ethiopian! It was delicious. Everything tasted so fresh. Definitely would recommend this restaurant and want to go back. I believe our server was the owner or manager. She was very kind and explained all the foods to us. Love the spongy bread!

Unfortunately we never had the chance to try out their coffee nor their food. We came in during one of the weekends to try out Ethiopian coffee ceremony at noon. Our other group of friend came in as well but since the coffee ceremony can only fit 5 at a time, they decided to order lunch.
So begin our journey of the long wait. Granted that it’s a mom and pop place and granted that as a business owner I would probably want to take meal order over coffee. When it comes down to it, they should have been more up front about the wait time. Each time we ask, the owner kept saying it would be couple more minutes. We started this at noon and by 1:15 pm we decided the couple of minutes is really like never and that we should leave to get lunch. I was especially hungry and angry and being hangry was not a good combination for me.
The food that my friends had ordered looked good. Too bad the wait doesn’t make it worth it.

Waited over an hour for the coffee experience. Place wasn’t even busy. Unbelievable!

Ethiopian food!!! Incredibly friendly staff with such beaming beautiful smiles.
I’ve only had it a few times anywhere prior to this, and I initially thought the sponge bread was what didn’t do it for me. However. After coming here, I can say with confidence that the bread is great and the portions are deceiving. we ended up having more food than we could finish (there). We shared a couple of the veggie platters and it though it took quite a while to come out (nobody else was there and it was off hours), it came out hot and delicious! Definitely think we’ll be coming back to this spot soon.
It smells awesome in there, too. and I don’t mean the food. There’s a incense in the air that is very comforting. If the entirety of Ethiopia smells as such, then it must be swell place to live.

To heck with it — the food is well made, the service is good, the space is pleasant. There’s a price point at which I’d ask a lot more of a restaurant, but Kezira is among the least expensive sit down places in Seattle, certainly at this level of skill.

We came here with a biggish group (about 10 people) for our monthly dining group outing.
The location has no parking lot, so you will have to find street parking.
The interior is quite nice. Cool artwork on the walls, a small private room, neat looking bar, lots of seating, and overall just some cool touches.
The food was okay. I had the beef tibs and I found the beef kind of chewy and tough. Decent sized portions and all the injera you could want, so you would have a really hard time walking away from here still hungry. I tasted some of the other dishes on other people’s combo plates and everything seemed like solid Ethiopian eats. Nothing really stood out as phenomenal or as bad… though I did notice the lack of boiled egg on the meat combo plate. Doesn’t it usually come with an egg?
They have African beers that were fun to try.
The customer service… eh…not good. We had called ahead and said we were bringing around ten, so I’m not sure why they seemed to be so unprepared for us. Our server was certainly sweet enough, but I think she was overwhelmed. Getting water and drinks was more difficult than one would imagine. The food came out just willy-​nilly, with no timing so that everybody could eat at around the same time. I didn’t get my food until almost everybody else was practically done eating, and later than the person who ordered fifteen minutes after me. One diner was very specific about needing gluten-​free injera and they initially brought out regular injera. Had she not recognized the lack of purple color, she might have been in trouble.
I think if we had been a table of two or three, the customer service would have been fine; but large groups are maybe not their thing. Everything just took much longer and seemed way more complicated than it should have, particularly considering we were the only customers they had for most of the night.
They did let us do separate checks, so that was really nice of them.
I dunno, there are so many places for Ethiopian in the area, I don’t know that there was anything compelling enough to make me choose this place over another.

I like supporting little neighborhood joints even if they’re not top-​notch quality. Atmosphere usually makes up for it.
But at some point during or after their remodel, Kezira went from acceptable to inedible. No flavor, no spice, no differentiation between the dishes at all … and the lentils weren’t even cooked through. Crunchy lentils. Yuck. I’m so sad … I’ll miss being able to rely on this place for a quick weeknight dinner. There are wayyy better options in town.
On the upside … the injera was delicious.
Kezira, will you get better? I want to like you again.

Delicious food! Not too greasy, very authentic. Owners very nice and gives customers privacy. Wonderful traditional coffee from Ethiopia. Incorporates a lot of Eritrean influences as well. Overall delightful experience highly recommend it.