Best Ethiopian Food In Howard County

Ethiopian takeout at Roots Market

It's just Ethiopian food.  No one has opened an Ethiopian restaurant in Howard County.  But Roots Market has imported the food from Silver Spring.

The Clarksville grocer stocked a half dozen dishes cooked by the Gete Restaurant when we came through the prepared foods section on Thursday.  One with green beans and carrots.  One with greens.  One with beets and potatoes.  Two varieties of lentils.

They're all delicious.  The deep, but mild flavors that make Ethiopian so interesting.  They're all vegetable stews, although the pureed lentils were a contrast -- intensely spicy.  We bought the whole lentils.  For $8, we each got large scoops at two meals.  For $25, you could create a three-dish dinner that would easily serve four people.

Roots curates a pretty good wall of prepared foods.  Mrs. HowChow can't roll through without a container of the guacamole.  They deploy those "tasting" stations that always reel us in.  I only bought Gete's food because I tried the greens and thought they were outstanding -- the perfect texture of tender, but still something to bite.

We also ended up with Effie's Oatcakes, a last-minute trap laid at the checkout and baited with these cookie-crackers that taste of oats, butter, and a dash of salt.  Not Ethiopian, but worth picking up as well.

If you want an Ethiopian restaurant, you just need to go one exit outside the county -- Soretti's on Rte 198 in Burtonsville.  Soretti's has become a nice, casual restaurant.  It opened years ago as a cofee shop, but now it is strictly lunch and dinner.