From Bethesda Magazine: A conversation with the co-owners of Silver Spring’s Beteseb

The Ethiopian restaurant received a James Beard Award nomination this year

June 4, 2026 10:53 a.m.

Veggie combo at Beteseb. Photo credit: Scott Suchman

Beteseb made surprising news earlier this year, becoming just the third Ethiopian restaurant in the area—and the first in Montgomery County—to claim a James Beard Award nomination. I sat down in early March with co-owners Darmyelesh and Aynalem Alemu, sister and brother (and chef and manager) at their restaurant in downtown Silver Spring to talk about the nomination for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic. (Beteseb was not selected to move on as a finalist when that list was announced in late March.)

This is the second wave of national attention for Beteseb. The first came in 2019, when celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson pulled up to the restaurant to shoot a video for Eater about its kitfo, a finely minced tartare of (in Darmyelesh’s version) eye round beef tossed with a spiced fermented butter (niter kibbeh) the color of liquefied gold. Proclaimed Samuelsson, after a single, eye-closing bite: “I think I’ve found the kitfo goddess.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Beteseb’s Aynalem (left) and Darmyelesh Alemu. Photo credit: Scott Suchman

Tell me what it was like when you got word of the nomination—it had to come as a pretty big shock, yes?

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Darmyelesh: Oh my God. … I cried and cried. This nomination—I never imagined it, it was out of my imagination. It was fully emotional, and still right now is, because when you start from scratch, and this is your dream, and you work so hard, day by day, for yourself and your family, but also your community—showing them what can happen.

Aynalem: How many restaurants are there in America? And so many kinds, Italian, Mexican, Chinese. … It’s a lot. And in our area? And the Ethiopian restaurants—how many? 50? 60? More, probably. And so, you know—why us? But also: This honor—it is for all them, too. I have a cousin—58 years she’s here, in this area. She lives in Potomac. She called to congratulate us, she was so happy. She said, ‘You have to understand, there was nothing here when I first came.’

Nothing here?

A: No Ethiopian restaurants. No cafes. No coffee shops.

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Right, that was in the ’60s. The first wave arrived in the ’70s and then came a dramatic growth spurt in the ’80s, with Red Sea, Fasika, Meskerem and Dukem, all in D.C. And then another wave followed in the aughts: Etete and then, later, Zenebech, which also received a Beard nomination. And of course, Silver Spring has become its own scene over the past decade, which coincides neatly with your timeline. You opened in 2015. But as I understand it, your family was on the scene well before that.

A: Yes. My bigger brother came first to D.C. And he had a factory in Addis Ababa [in Ethiopia]. And started a business here, in 2008—ET Teff Injera—importing injera from Addis. And that business made injera for many of the restaurants. And still does. And all the spices, too. 

How important is that, to have that kind of hook-up?

D: Very important. In Ethiopian cooking, so much is about the spices, how you spice, the mix. We know who made them. Other places maybe they buy from a distributor that maybe they don’t know. But we get it to our specifications. 

You talk about the importance of the spicing—I think one of the misperceptions of Ethiopian food, among people who are new to it, or who don’t eat it a lot, is that it’s spicy, as opposed to spiced. Your dishes don’t shy away from heat, but most of the time the mission seems to be to deliver something more symphonic and rich than simply to zap or tingle the tongue.

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D: Oh. That makes me happy to hear. The way you spice, that is your—I don’t know the word.

Your signature?

D: Or your fingerprint. I get mine from my mother, and so when I spice, I am with her, I am talking to her.

A conversation across time and space …

D: Yes.

I want to go back for a moment with the two of you—back to when you opened, in 2015. I understand there were some hard, lean months.

A: It took a lot of money to start. Just the construction—$245,000. And then everything else, the permitting, the design, the furniture. We didn’t have money for staff. It was just the two of us, running dishes, buying, cooking.

D: We didn’t buy like restaurants buy, from Restaurant Depot—the sizes were too big and we couldn’t afford to waste food. We were buying from Safeway.

Safeway—really?

D: Safeway, yes. Right around the corner, we were lucky. For five, six months we did this, buying just what we needed. But day by day, gradually there was changing, and we never gave up.

A: And we had a lot of support. Not just family, but other restaurants around us, the other Ethiopian businesses.

And now look—with the nomination, you have a massive wave of new customers.

D: Oh yes, sir. A lot of customers. Some of them, they tell us it’s the first time for them here and the first time, also, tasting this food. They tell us it’s good, it’s amazing—but sometimes there’s a negative thought.

And how does that feel?

D: That is good, too—we can use it to learn and improve. 

That’s a great way to look at things.

D: You have to learn, always, you have to. Every year I go back to visit my mom, and I take classes in Addis. 

What kind of classes?

D: Cooking classes, baking classes. And here, too, in the U.S. I am taking cooking classes right now, online. Learning from other chefs. New things. Everything always is changing—always. And we have to keep learning. Always, as long as we are alive. 

Beteseb, 8201 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring, 301-448-1625, betesebrestaurant.com

This appears in the May/June 2026 issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine