Howard County has a reputation for fantastic ethnic restaurants. The area’s Korean and Indian restaurants have recently — and very publicly — been lauded as some of the country’s best. Until a few years ago, though, Ethiopian food was hard to find within the county’s borders.
In 2013, Tigi’s Ethiopian Restaurant and Market changed that. Tucked in a shopping center just off Route 40, Tigi’s is cute and casual inside — but don’t let the laid-back atmosphere fool you. The food is some powerful stuff.
Tigi’s is named for its owner, Tigist Emeru, who operates the restaurant with her husband, Bellete Tessema. During our visit, on a quiet Thursday night, Tigi bounced between the dining room and the kitchen, her easy smile shining, setting the tone for a friendly meal.
We started with a vegetable sambusa. Similar to an Indian samosa, the sambusa was a triangular pastry stuffed with a combination of lentils, green peppers and onions, cooked down and heavily seasoned with African spices. Served on the side, a green dipping sauce was bright and spicy.
Ethiopian is a very vegetarian-friendly cuisine, and Tigi’s menu includes a variety of flavorful vegetarian and vegan options. Even serious carnivores won’t miss the meat (though meat dishes are also available). The sambusa’s stuffing, though based on lentils, was as satisfying and savory as any meat dish.
Newcomers to the Ethiopian food scene might be surprised to discover that when eating the African cuisine, utensils are not necessary. Instead, Ethiopian food is scooped up with torn pieces of injera, a spongy sourdough flatbread.
We explored Tigi’s menu with a combination platter, which serves a variety of dishes in small piles on one huge round of injera. Our favorite vegetarian options included a spicy pumpkin mash and cabbage, well-seasoned and braised until tender.
We were somewhat less enthusiastic about a brown lentil dish, which seemed bland next to some of the more flavorful foods on the table. Its mild taste wasn’t a complete disappointment, but it did pale in comparison to the other choices.
Tigi’s meat-based dishes were just as likable. Yebere tibs, beef cubes cooked in a sauce balancing garlic and ginger with spicy heat, was tender and lovely. Minchet abish, a stew of heavily spiced ground beef, was our favorite element of the combination platter.
Some of the fun with the combination platter comes with mixing and matching to create new bites. Because the dishes often include similar elements, such as onion, garlic, ginger and chilies, the flavors tend to complement one another. It’s fun, too, to compare how the dishes taste with and without the sour injera.
Tigi’s combination platters are designed for sharing; diners on their own might choose the doro wot, a rich, dark stew with chicken wings and a hard-boiled egg. Seasoned with berbere, an African spice blend that includes spicy, sweet and savory elements, the meal was intense and vibrant.
The stew’s flavor was powerful enough that it would have covered any sins in the cooking of the chicken or the egg. Fortunately, though, there were none to hide. The egg was springy and the chicken, still on the bone, was tender and juicy.
Tigi’s does not offer dessert, though after filling up on such a variety of dishes, we didn’t miss it. It also does not have a liquor license or currently allow BYOB. For us, water kept the spicy heat of our meal at bay.
After dinner, Tigi bid us farewell, with a big smile and an invitation to come back. Next time, we’ll take a bigger group. There are more dishes to try — and we’d like to taste them all.