Dilla Ethiopian restaurant — Restaurant in Minneapolis

A friend and I decided to venture into this establishment tonight as we were craving Ethiopian food. We've eaten here before, and decided to have it once more. The food was good, but there was a miscommunication in regards to one of the dishes; however, that is not the reason for the 2 star review, rather it is for the horrendously slow and uncaring customer service. I will write further giving, in detail, about what made the customer service bad.

Situation 1: The waitress suddenly left to attend to another table in the middle of taking our order. I had to flag down another waitress to make sure she got our order.

Situation 2: When the food came, we noticed that the Kitfo came fully cooked (kitfo is the minced-beef dish). I was under the impression that it was supposed to be raw. When I did my research later, I found that it could be cooked to different temperatures.

When we were ordering the Kitfo, the waitress did let us know that it is a raw dish, and we specifically told her that we were fine with it that way. Unfortunately she did not understand us as her mind was somewhere else (SHE LEFT during the middle of taking our order!!). I am not mad about the meat not being raw, but rather at her bad customer service and communication skills.

Situation 3: When both my friend and I finished our meal; we decided we needed napkins, a takeout box, and of course, the bill. It took a good half hour for everything to be completed. I tried flagging down the waitress and saying excuse me loud enough to be heard every time the waitress walked by, but to NO AVAIL!!

When the waitress finally came, she brought the bill and the box, but not the NAPKINS! HORRIBLE LISTENING SKILLS!! To save myself some time, I decided to WALK the bill back up to the counter, rather than wait for awhile... Okay, so I was a bit annoyed, and asked her again when giving her our cards. A good 15 minutes later, she brought back the bill with our cards, BUT NO NAPKINS!! I had to go the bathroom to grab myself some paper towels...

I always tip, but this is the first time that I did not tip an establishment, and I do not regret it.

We've been to the restaurant once before, and decided to try them again, but shame on me for thinking that they would have improved....

It takes a lot for me to give a negative review of a restaurant, especially right now when so many small businesses are struggling due to COVID 19, but the food was so awful and rancid (literally) that I wanted to put up a review to warn people. I've eaten a lot of Ethiopian food over the years (since the 80's) and this was the absolute worst that I've ever had.

We ordered Gomen Besga (collard greens with beef) and Nech Gomen (cabbage, carrots, potatoes, onion and peppers served in a mild sauce) through Door Dash. The Gomen Besga consisted of mainly jalapenos, a few bits of collard greens, a few chunks of mishapen, dry beef which was mainly connective tissue and inedible and a large chunk of eggshell (no eggs in Gomen Besga by the way). The collard greens were pretty decent but unfortunately only made up about 1/3 of the dish because the rest of it was literally ALL jalapenos.

As soon as we opened the Nech Gomen we were overwhelmed by the stench of rancid vinegar, which I'm pretty sure isn't a part of the usual "mild sauce". It consisted of a bunch of cooked white cabbage with partially cooked, withered (as in beginning to sprout) potatoes and no carrots or peppers. I took a bite and the rancid vinegar (like vinegar 3 years past it's freshness date) was so foul that I almost retched and I actually spit it out in revulsion. We promptly threw the rest of it away because we were concerned about getting food poisoning. We ended up having cereal for dinner.

I have never seen less pride put into food preparation, I understand a little bit of egg shell accidentally getting into something, but we're talking about almost 1/4 of an eggs worth of shell, the meat looked like what a butcher would cut off something and throw away, the potatoes were basically rotten and not even fully cooked, main ingredients were missing and there's absolutely no excuse to use vinegar that has turned rancid, the smell alone gives away that it's bad. I know that places are struggling financially due to COVID and may have to skimp on certain things but this was way beyond that.

I've had food here before and it was decent so I'm hoping that this was an isolated incident or that they'll read this review and make...

I wanted to love Dilla’s and in some ways, I did/do. The Ethiopian is good. The more Americanized cheeseburger and chicken strips are not; they are bad — my kids love these things and are pretty tolerant of anything on a bun or in chicken strip format as long as it’s fried. The burger patty had no flavor, was overdone, and missing the pickles and tomato that were ordered by name (I’ll get to ‘why ordering stuff doesn’t work at Dilla’) in a minute. ‘Chicken strips’ doesn’t translate to ‘white leather’ in any language I’m aware of, but hey, I’m a midwestern kid. What do I know?

The Ethiopian food was really a good experience. Injera tasted how it should and the doro wat was pleasant enough.

The two stars here are for everything else.

We walked in and were promptly seated. Some of our waters had ice while others were warm, and not room temperature warm either. No drink order was ever taken and the waitress couldn’t be bothered to answer our questions about the menu — without making eye contact, she would say “yes” and suggest something else on the menu that we neither pointed to or asked about without giving any explanation. After we tried four times to order and ask about menu options, she huffed and said she’d com back and left never to return.

20 minutes later, a man who was constantly picking up after her messes (we watched him bus and serve all of her tables) stopped by our table to very politely and patiently walk us through the entire thing. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much time because of the waitress he was covering for heavily — we watched several other patrons complain of not being served for times ranging from 15 to 45 minutes.

The kids meals arrived already cooled. The main tray was fine. The Diet Coke never showed up and the appetizers were served blisteringly hot for dessert.

The check never showed up, so I tracked down the manager to pay for dinner.

Will...