This Ethiopian Dive Bar’s Most Surprising Hit Is Its All-You-Can-Eat Veggie Combo

You wouldn’t think Club Waziema even serves food.

We rolled up to the ancient Divisadero Street watering hole at a little past nine o’clock on a Friday night, drawn by Waziema’s reputation as San Francisco’s best and only Ethiopian dive bar. Inside the crowded, dimly lit room, the jukebox blared the opening chords of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” while a gaggle of half-tipsy twentysomethings ordered “whatever red wine” and three vodka cranberries at the long, curved bar. (“Perfect order,” the bartender quipped.)

The place has that homey, lived-in quality that all the best dive bars have, with its gorgeous, red-velvet damask wallpaper, rumored to date back to the 1940s. Framed photos of legends like Louis Armstrong and Marvin Gaye who played there during the bar’s heyday as a jazz club in the ’60s and ’70s, when it was called Club Morocco, line the walls.

These days, Club Waziema isn’t really a jazz club anymore (though it does host a lot of trendy underground DJ shows). A busy pool table occupies the elevated stage area where B.B. King once sang the blues. But like a proper neighborhood dive, the whole place buzzes with laughter and loud conversation, everyone throwing back Red Stripes and decently cheap cocktails.

Only when we looked carefully did we notice that a handful of customers were bent over heaping mounds of Ethiopian food, served, charmingly, on those red, swirly-patterned melamine plates you can find in every Chinese American household.

Yes, as it turns out, Waziema is also one of the best-loved Ethiopian restaurants in the city, though it doesn’t much advertise that fact. There’s no obvious signage — no mention of food on the chalkboard drinks menu. But if you ask about it, a bartender will hand you a laminated menu, noting helpfully that the last call for food is at 10 p.m. (The bar itself stays open until 2 a.m.)

About that food menu: It’s probably the most concise that I’ve encountered in the Bay Area’s venerable Ethiopian restaurant scene — but also, to be fair, the most extensive Ethiopian menu I’ve seen at a dive bar. All told, there are nine dishes listed, but it’s really more like four, since the entire vegetarian side of the menu comes included in the $18 veggie combo. It’s hard to see why you wouldn’t just order that — especially since it turns out to be ALL YOU CAN EAT. (Though again, there’s nothing on the menu to indicate this.) We ordered one of those and one meat combo — which came with our choice of two out of three meat offerings — and we’d essentially ordered the entire menu.

Our favorite was the berbere-tinged beef stew (aka sega wot), which was wonderfully tender and rich. There was also a solid version of lamb tibs, that killer combination of seared lamb and sauteed onions that goes so perfectly with soft, tangy injera. On the veggie combo side, we loved the atakilt wat, listed on the menu as “veggie stew,” even though it was all potatoes; somehow the cabbage and carrots had gone missing. What amazing potatoes, though — perfectly cooked, sauce-slicked, incredibly tasty. We also loved the softly stewed red lentils (misir wot), which was the most spice-forward and aggressively seasoned dish.

Look, you can find Ethiopian food in Oakland or San Jose that has brighter flavors and more intense, intricate spicing. The kitchen definitely goes easy on the heat, even in that misir wot, to keep things accessible for Club Waziema’s multiethnic, largely non-Ethiopian crowd.