Sidamo Coffee and Tea

Washington has the largest Ethiopian population of any American city, and Sidamo is one of the places where that shows up as a room rather than a statistic. Kenfe Bellay and his wife Yalemzwed Desta opened it at 417 H Street NE in 2006, well before the H Street Corridor became a nightlife strip, and Bellay became enough of a fixture that people called him the mayor of H Street. He died in May 2022; Desta has run the shop since, and the notice the family posted still sits on its homepage. His own account of the ambition was deliberately small - a typical neighbourhood coffee shop, and that was all he wanted it to be.

What it actually does is more particular than that. The coffees are single-origin rather than blends, and they are roasted on site two or three times a week, which is unusual for a cafe of this size. The three that anchor the list map onto Ethiopia's best-known growing regions: the Sidamo the shop is named after, the fruitier Yirgacheffe, and the Harar, which carries the full-bodied mocha character the region is known for. Alongside them sits a wide tea selection, and the room keeps free Wi-Fi and a back patio, which makes it a working cafe as much as a drop-in one.

The fixture worth planning around is the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony, held every Sunday at 2pm and run continuously since the shop opened - Washington City Paper marked its five hundredth. The ceremony is the full version: green beans roasted in front of you, ground by hand, brewed in a jebena and poured in three rounds, with incense burning throughout. It takes time on purpose, and it is one of the few things in the city that gives a Sunday afternoon a shape without involving a bar.

No alcohol is served at any hour. The practical limits are the hours - 7am to 6pm, seven days - which make this a daytime and early-evening venue rather than a night out, and the location, which is at the quieter Union Station end of H Street rather than in the middle of the bar strip. Union Station is a short walk, and the streetcar runs along H Street itself.