How to read a menu
How to read a Amharic menu
You are standing in front of a menu with no pictures and no English, and someone is waiting. This is about that moment.
What actually makes it difficult
Amharic is written in the Ge'ez script, which is a syllabary rather than an alphabet: each character stands for a consonant-and-vowel pair, so there are well over two hundred of them and no shortcut through learning a handful of letters. In practice the bigger obstacle is that most menus outside Ethiopia print romanised names only, and romanise them inconsistently — wat, wot, wet and we't all turn up, sometimes on the same page, and kitfo, ketfo and tibs, tebs do the same. Word order also runs against English habit: doro wat is chicken stew, and the ye- prefix means 'of', which is how ye'tsom, 'of fasting', marks a dish made without animal products.
Eliminate sections before you read dishes
Ethiopian menus are grouped by how the food is cooked, and that grouping does most of the work for you. Ruling out a whole section is faster than reading twenty dish names.
The centre of the menu. The useful division is not the protein but the spicing: key wat is built on berbere and is red and hot, alicha is built on turmeric and is yellow and mild. Reading the menu that way tells you far more than reading it for chicken or beef.
Cubes of meat sautéed to order with onion, garlic and green chilli. Drier than a wat, cooked fast rather than slow, and usually the least spiced meat section on the page.
Minced raw beef dressed with chilli and spiced butter. It can be ordered lightly warmed or cooked through, and the menu does not always make clear that the default is raw — worth asking if that matters to you.
Beyaynetu means an assortment: several stews spooned side by side onto one round of injera. Ordering it is how most people should start, because it is a tasting menu disguised as a single line item. The fasting version, ye'tsom beyaynetu, is the all-vegan one.
Not really a section, though menus list it so you can order more. It is the plate, the cutlery and a course in itself — a fermented teff flatbread, spongy and distinctly sour, that everything above arrives on top of. There is usually no cutlery, and the platter is usually shared.
Words worth recognising
Not a phrasebook. Five things that change what you order.
stew — the main category on the menu
sautéed cubes of meat, cooked to order
mild and turmeric-based, made without berbere — the word to look for if you do not want heat
the red chilli-and-spice blend, and where the heat lives
fasting — a ye'tsom dish is made without meat, dairy or egg
Translation is not interpretation
A translator converts words, which sounds like the job and is not. The output is frequently correct and useless at the same time.
ፍርፍር
Translated word-for-word: “crumbled”
Injera torn into pieces and cooked back into berbere and spiced butter, usually eaten at breakfast. The name describes what was done to the bread and gives no hint that the dish is very largely bread.
What Ethiopian menus don’t print
Nobody is hiding anything. These are foundational ingredients that a Ethiopian kitchen treats the way you treat salt — not an ingredient, a medium. That is exactly why they never appear in a description.
Spiced clarified butter, and the single biggest surprise in a cuisine otherwise famous for suiting vegans. It is the default cooking fat in a great many stews, it is stirred into kitfo, and nothing on the menu mentions it. Fasting dishes are usually made with oil instead, which is why the fasting label matters so much here.
The red chilli-and-spice blend behind every key wat. Blends are house-made and vary enormously between kitchens, so the same dish name can arrive gently warm or genuinely fierce. Menus almost never grade it.
A hotter blend than berbere, built on bird's eye chilli. Served alongside kitfo and often already mixed into it, so the raw beef can be considerably hotter than it looks.
A mild, crumbly fresh cheese served to cool the heat. It frequently appears on a combination platter and beside gomen without being listed as a component.
Sweetens spiced breads and some sauces, and is the base of tej — the Ethiopian honey wine. Vegans who avoid honey rarely think to ask about it here.
Recipes vary between restaurants and change without notice, so treat all of this as what to raise with the kitchen rather than a guarantee about any particular dish. The staff always have the final word.
TableSage reads menus using an AI language model, which gets things wrong sometimes.
Or photograph it and skip the alphabet.
TableSage reads the menu in front of you and tells you what each dish actually is.