What do you actually order at an Ethiopian restaurant if you’ve never been to one before?
That’s the question I had the first time I walked into Vana Ethiopian Restaurant on Summer Street, a few blocks north of the train station in a stretch of Stamford that doesn’t get a lot of food-writing attention. The space is simple — maybe fifteen tables, warm amber lighting, and injera-print fabric on a couple of the walls. No hostess stand, just a woman who came over immediately and asked if I’d been before. When I said no, she didn’t hand me a menu. She pulled up a chair.
That’s the experience at Vana. It’s a family-run place, and the family part isn’t just marketing copy. The woman who seated me turned out to be one of the owners, and she walked me through every dish on the combination platter the way you’d explain your grandmother’s recipes to a curious guest — not a sales pitch, just genuine pride in what they cook.
The combination platter is the right move for a first visit. It runs around $22 and arrives as a wide, circular piece of injera — the spongy, slightly sour sourdough flatbread that doubles as your plate and your utensil — topped with six or seven mounds of different stews and salads. I got the vegetarian version, which included misir (red lentils cooked down with berbere spice), gomen (collard greens with garlic and ginger), tikil gomen (cabbage and carrots, milder than it sounds), and a couple of others that I’m still not sure I can name correctly but ate every last bite of. You tear off pieces of injera and scoop up the stew with your fingers. It sounds messy; it isn’t, really.
The meat options are worth mentioning too. A friend who came with me on a second visit ordered the doro wat — a slow-braised chicken leg in a rich, deep-red berbere sauce — and it was the kind of dish that made us both stop talking for a minute. The sauce has layers: heat, cardamom, something almost smoky underneath. The chicken had been cooking long enough that it fell apart when you looked at it wrong.
Prices stay reasonable throughout the menu. Most entrees are between $16 and $24. There’s no alcohol license, but they bring out honey tea or Ethiopian coffee if you ask, and the coffee service — roasted beans, a clay pot, small cups — is worth experiencing on its own.
The room fills up on Friday and Saturday evenings, and Vana doesn’t take reservations, so either go early (before 6:30) or be prepared to wait outside for twenty minutes. Weekday lunches are quieter and the lunch specials are a good deal, usually around $13 to $15 for a smaller combination with a drink.
What makes Vana stick with you isn’t any single dish, though the doro wat would make a strong case. It’s the pace of the place — nobody rushing you, nobody performing. You eat slowly because the food rewards it, and because there’s something almost social about a meal built around a shared plate that you eat with your hands. By the end of my first visit I’d tried things I couldn’t name and liked almost all of them.
That’s a decent answer to the question of what to order: let them guide you, and trust the combination platter. You’ll figure out what to ask for on the second visit.
