Lalibela Restaurants

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This is a place where you can get excellent food.
The owner offers local food especially fasting food and also some more westernise dishes like pasta or Pizza.

My friends had local food and they enjoyed it very much. I choosed pizza and it was truly great despite the fact that there was no cheese.

I definitely recomand the unique restaurant, good healthy and cheap.

Local food was 15 birrs and my pizza was 20 birrs. Beer is at 7 birrs.

If you wish, some musician can play and sing. We decline the performance.

Favorite Dish: Pizza

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The Blue Nile is just up the hill from the main entrance to the rock churches. It’s a simple family run place that serves Ethiopian food. I stopped in fro breakfast when I was really hungry. I ordered Fir-Fir of course. The down side – they made it from scratch and it was slow. The upside? It was good, was plenty of food and was cheap. A good choice for Ethiopian food.

This local restaurant is in the downhill part of the town, near the Tourist Info.
It serves good breakfasts and the main dishes are huge. They have "normal" (not only injhera) dishes as rice with vegetables and hamburgers and the prices were very convenient too.

The local dishes are excellent and delicious. In average you will have to pay about 8 Birr for a local dish and about 15 for a western dish like pizza or roasted chicken. A coke is 4 Birr and a Dashen goes for 5 Birr. If a woman comes in shaking hands with the guests, you know you are facing the owner. She was living for a long time in France and to organise the needed ingredients she sometimes goes personally to Addis Ababa to organise them. Its interesting to chat with her.

After our delicous injera meal in the Unique Restaruant we had of course a coffee ceremony, the second one that day. Our host sitting on her stool started to burn her charcoal stove and at the same time some incense. She roasted the coffeebeans at a iron plate.

When she find out that we liked to make pictures of her and the ceremony, she disappeared to change her clothes. She came back in her most beautiful white natala with a nicily decorated border or tibeb.

At that time the coffee and the incense has started to smoke so heavily in the small room, that we hardly couldn't make any clear pictures of the ceremony and the lovely lady.

In the Unique Restaurant we had the local injera, but in almost every restaurant in the country you can eat it. Injera is the national staple, serving as a base for a meal. Injera, made of the local cereal tef, looks like a thin pancake and tastes a little sour.

The food like vegetables, meat, sauces is heaped on top of this pancake. Also the injera can be served rolled up beside the food. Anyway tear of a piece of the injera and wrap it around the food, using the injera as ''spoon''.

Injera is served at a communal tray at a mesob (mushroom-shaped table). Use always your right hand and avoid touching your mouth or licking your fingers. Take the food only from your side of the communal tray.

And with the injera we drunk the local tej, the popular Ethiopian honey wine.

We got the advice to have dinner in an unique restaurant in the livingroom of a local house. Our driver brought us to the place passing very dark alleyways. When we arrived at the place we saw the sign "Unique Restaurant''. This must be the place.

A few years ago a family has started this restaurant in their livingroom serving the local injera. Their livingroom was extended a bit now, so three small groups could eat at the same time. It was a very cosy place in a lovely local ambiance.

Favorite Dish: The local injera and the loca tej.

After we had finished our pizzas for lunch, the host of the Blue Nile Restaurant invited us for a coffee-ceremony. It was rather cool in the room and we had enough time left to visit the second group of churches that day, so we accepted the invitation.

The lady sat on her stool besides the charcoal stove. To create a good ambiance, she burned incense and also the freshly cut grass didn't miss on the floor. First the coffeebeans were roasted. Next the beans were ground with a mortar and brewed up with water.

We drunk our three cups with lots of sugar with pleasure before we went back in the outdoor heat.