{"id":296447,"date":"2026-07-15T11:30:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T11:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/296447\/"},"modified":"2026-07-15T11:30:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T11:30:11","slug":"makina-is-queenss-first-eritrean-and-ethiopian-restaurant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/296447\/","title":{"rendered":"Makina Is Queens\u2019s First Eritrean and Ethiopian Restaurant"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n The restaurant opened on Skillman Avenue earlier this year.
\n Photo: Courtesy of Makina\n <\/p>\n

Queens, our most diverse borough, is rightfully known as an immigrant-restaurant hub. But among its Tibetan momos and real-deal goat barbacoa, it was not home to an Eritrean or Ethiopian restaurant until this winter, when Makina<\/a> opened in Sunnyside. \u201cI\u2019m one of those people that eats injera on a daily basis,\u201d says owner Eden Egziabher, who was born in Eritrea, raised in Ethiopia\u2019s capital, Addis Ababa, and moved to Queens in 2008. She had to commute into Manhattan whenever she wanted her favorite food: \u201cI was making other Habesha restaurants very rich before I opened up my restaurant.\u201d She started with the Makina food truck in 2017, intended as a point of introduction for Eritrean and Ethiopian food, offering a build-your-own format, scooping tibs, a classic dish of seared meat and aromatics, into wraps and onto turmeric-rice bowls for midtown lunches. The goal was to make the food as familiar as possible to an American audience, but the plan was always to open a restaurant, even if she didn\u2019t know it would take three years to build. (In addition to the usual headaches with funding and landmark-building permits, Egziabher had to find the one guy in California who imports beer from Asmara.) When it finally came time to open the brick-and-mortar location \u2014 it seats 36 and has Art Deco touches that evoke the architecture in Eritrea\u2019s capital; additional outdoor tables are due in August \u2014 Egziabher wanted to focus less on accessibility and instead zoom in on unsung elements within her culture\u2019s recipe canon.<\/p>\n

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\n Injera chips with tomato, berbere, and ayib cheese.
\n Photo: Courtesy of Makina\n <\/p>\n

She consulted with Tsehay Parvaresh, a.k.a. Tsehay\u2019s Kitchen<\/a>, a Swedish-based Ethiopian chef with a shared sensibility, who developed recipes and introduced Egziabher to suppliers like Red Fox Spices<\/a>, which specializes in heirloom blends. One of the resulting dishes is Makina\u2019s koseret tibs, its name nodding to koseret, an indigenous highland plant with a heady, minty aroma that is infused into clarified butter and used throughout the cuisine. For the tibs, the saucy lamb gets a boost from the butter as well as dried koseret that\u2019s added during cooking.<\/p>\n

Makina eschews the communal-dining format customers might otherwise expect from Eritrean and Ethiopian restaurants in favor of a family-style format with sharable plates served alongside injera. \u201cEach dish needs its own shine. The way that we\u2019re displaying it, it\u2019s standing on its own,\u201d Egziabher says. It\u2019s true to how she ate with her family, as is the inclusion of cotoletta \u2014 breaded cutlets \u2014 which, like lasagna, cappuccinos, and the word macchina, is Eritrean by way of Italian colonization.<\/p>\n

Makina\u2019s \u201ccotoletta Asmara\u201d starts with skirt steak, which stays juicy and medium rare under berbere panko, that\u2019s fried to a golden crunch and plated with a halo of fris\u00e9e and sherry-vinegar shallots. Egziabher says the cutlet serves as an effective hedge for picky or spice-averse diners; they could also go for lamb alicha, braised with sweetly caramelized minced onions and flavored with ginger and turmeric, which turns into a rich but relatively mild sauce. The same slow-cooked onion base is the foundation for Makina\u2019s berbere-based, 12-hour doro wat. \u201cYou can\u2019t expedite that process,\u201d Egziabher says.<\/p>\n

There is also dulet, a labor-intensive dish of chopped offal, which is ideally prepared right after a lamb has been killed, one of many reasons that it is more likely to be found at a wedding or Easter celebration than in a restaurant. Makina\u2019s version uses mushrooms to mock the chew of intestine with minced peppers and lots of the requisite parsley. It joins the classic standbys of misir (spicy red-lentil stew), shiro (powdered-chickpea stew), gomen (collard greens), and tikel gomen (cabbage with potatoes and carrots) as vegan options. Seafood comes in the form of fish tsebhi, simmered with wine, and berbere-grilled prawns. Everyone else should get the kitfo, raw beef peppered with mitmita, a blend of bird\u2019s-eye chile, cardamom, cloves, and salt. Makina\u2019s is as good as it gets, combined with enough of the aforementioned scented butter to pool around the edges of the bowl. It\u2019s served with a scoop of crumbly homemade cottage cheese to cool the burn, or, alternatively, you can order more mitmita to turn it up.<\/p>\n

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\n Fish tsebhi with a beer from Eritrea\u2019s Asmara Brewery on the side.
\n Photo: Courtesy of Makina\n <\/p>\n

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