Great food and excellent coffee – Muya Restaurant!
Wendessen Weldegiorgis brought Ethiopian cuisine to Kitchener-Waterloo in his Muya Restaurant (check out all the positive reviews on Yelp and TripAdvisor!). Muya is located in a small mall on Highland Avenue West in a lively area of Kitchener, not far from downtown.
Wendessen, a tall man with a serious mien, moved from Montreal where he had a small bakery and restaurant, and in 2009, started a bakery to supply injira, the traditional Ethiopian bread, to Ethiopian restaurants and groceries in Toronto and south-western Ontario. Injira, now baked on an industrial scale, is a major part of Wendessen’s family business and led to opening Muya Restaurant in 2017.
For the first year, Muya was strictly take-out, but when an adjacent site became available, Wendessen took it and expanded into a sit-down and take-out restaurant with a small grocery store added later. In addition to its food, Muya is famous for its coffee ceremony – a centuries’ old tradition which is still practiced daily by every Ethiopian family no matter where it lives.
Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee. The country has an extremely wide variety of coffees (reputedly over 10,000 different varieties) ensuring that every coffee lover will be able to find something to please them. Muya Grocery (a few doors to the right near the end of the mall) stocks Tomoca Italian-style roasted coffee (imported and sold online by Just Ethiopian Coffees) in both medium roast (FAMIGLIA type) and dark roast (BAR type).
Check out Muya Restaurant and grocery for a great meal and great coffee – and take home some Tomoca coffee!
Muya Restaurant
215 Highland Rd W,
Kitchener, ON N2M 3C1
519-208-8588
https://www.facebook.com/MuyaRestaurantKW/