What is Authentic EthioAfrican?
Authentic EthioAfrican is the first Ethiopian restaurant Scottsdale has had. It opened on January 23, 2025, at 6989 N Hayden Road, Unit A12, in the strip center on the southeast corner of Hayden Road and Indian Bend, across the road from the McCormick Ranch side of the greenbelt. “In Scottsdale, we don’t have any Ethiopian food, and it’s a tourist destination,” owner Anduale Hassan told Phoenix New Times. “That’s why we chose this place.”
Hassan and his wife Elsabet Tiruneh are the whole story. He grew up in Addis Ababa, emigrated in the 1990s and spent two decades in the food business before the couple opened the original Authentic EthioAfrican in 2012, a 650-square-foot nook at McDowell Road and 18th Street in Phoenix with a pair of tables, where Tiruneh and Hassan’s mother made the injera and nearly everything went out the door in bags. New Times called it a ghost restaurant hiding in plain sight. The pandemic changed it: while other restaurants went to takeout, this one went the other way, into a sit-down room with Ethiopian furniture, cocktails and a coffee service. New Times named it the best African food in town in 2021, a $100,000 LISC loan funded an expansion next door in 2022, and by 2025 the McDowell Road block had a bakery, a breakfast menu and a community hall in the works.
Scottsdale got the same food in a bigger, darker, more deliberate room. The former tenant was a sushi restaurant, and its long bar now pours cocktails sweetened with baklava syrup and rimmed with mitmita, the clove-and-chile spice blend. The walls are matte black under 30-foot ceilings with mesquite accents; the cowhide art, instruments and fabric curtains came back with Hassan from a trip to Ethiopia; and a section of straw hut by the door holds the Habesha coffee-ceremony display. The menu is wots (stews), tibs, kitfo and a ten-side vegetarian platter on house injera, and almost 80 percent of it is plant-based.
It is a family restaurant in a strip mall on a residential corner. Our verdict: the most interesting new kitchen in central Scottsdale in 2025, and the best reason a visitor has to eat something the resorts cannot cook.
How to eat at Authentic EthioAfrican
Order for the table. Ethiopian food arrives on one large round of injera, the spongy, slightly sour flatbread that is also the utensil: you tear a piece, pinch up a stew and eat. Combinations are the point. The Vegan Deluxe with ten sides (spicy chickpeas, red lentils, split peas, garlicky collard greens, cabbage and carrots gold with turmeric, tomatoes and more) feeds two and shows what the kitchen does best. Add one meat. Doro Wot Key, the chicken stew that Hassan says tastes like his childhood in Addis Ababa, simmers eight hours with onions, garlic, ginger and berbere and comes with a hard-boiled egg and a cool, salty house cheese. Tibs, cubed meat sautéed hot with rosemary, onions and peppers, comes as lamb, chicken, fish or beef; the menu also lists Shekla beef tibs and a spicy version. Kitfo is the minced lean beef with butter and mitmita for the traditionalists. Samplers, sambusas and awaze wings fill in. Hoodline listed meals at $9 to $17 at opening; the restaurant has not published prices online.
Ask about the bread. The house injera is teff blended with barley and wheat. A 100 percent teff version, which is gluten-free, is made on request, a practice New Times reported at the Phoenix original. The family now bakes injera for retail on McDowell Road, where it has become, in Hassan’s words, a hot commodity.
Drink the coffee, then a cocktail. The traditional coffee ceremony of roasting, grinding and brewing runs two hours; the owners have cut it to an introduction and a pour of spiced coffee, which Hassan compares to espresso with spices. At the bar, the coffee martini made with the house-roasted beans is the drink he says became popular. African jazz plays, and reviewers have described visits of close to two hours; that is the pace the room is built for.
Timing, and a warning on hours. At opening, Hoodline listed hours of Thursday through Monday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. By mid-2026 the restaurant’s own site showed a 3 p.m. opening and a Wednesday closure, Yelp showed 4 p.m. weekday starts with Wednesday closed, and one map directory had flagged the address as closed while others still showed hours. Call (480) 292-8919 before you drive. The McDowell Road original keeps 11 to 9.
Getting there. The center’s lot opens off Hayden just south of Indian Bend; look for Unit A12. The greenbelt path runs across the road, and McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park is a mile north, an easy pairing with an afternoon on the trains.
The ghost restaurant that came to Hayden Road
For a decade Authentic EthioAfrican was a Phoenix storefront in the most literal way: 650 square feet under an awning striped in the flag’s green, yellow and red, four tables nobody sat at, and an owner working three tablets and a laptop to keep up with delivery orders. New Times’ profile of that era (headline: great Ethiopian food hiding in plain sight) described Hassan’s plan to expand only by opening more ghost outposts. The pandemic reversed him. By 2021 the restaurant was a destination with imported furniture, a cocktail list and a coffee service, and New Times gave it the best African food award. LISC’s 2022 loan story tells the next step: a $100,000 expansion next door, the old room converted to a small market of immigrant-made goods, live Afrobeat and jazz on weekends.
Scottsdale was the next bet. Hassan’s reasoning was commercial and cultural at once: the city had no Ethiopian restaurant, and it had visitors. The corner he picked, Hayden and Indian Bend, is a residential crossroads of McCormick Ranch and the older subdivisions west of Hayden, with a strip center whose last tenant in the space was a sushi restaurant; he kept its bar. He spent a trip to Ethiopia buying the art and fabric, and he built the coffee display into a straw hut by the door so that the first thing a Scottsdale diner sees is the ceremony, not a menu.
What the record says and does not say. It says the opening date, the owners, the room, the menu and the reason, all from New Times and Hoodline in February 2025. It does not say how the first year went. No critic has reviewed the Scottsdale room, the restaurant has never published prices or a reliable weekly schedule online, and by 2026 its listed hours had narrowed to evenings with a midweek dark day, often a sign of a family stretched across two kitchens. One directory marked the address closed while the restaurant’s own site and Yelp did not. We write this as an open restaurant because its owners say it is, with the caution that the hours on the door are the ones that count.
Honest assessment: Authentic EthioAfrican is a serious, generous, deeply personal restaurant that landed in a part of Scottsdale with no tradition of eating this way and has had to teach its neighbors one platter at a time. The food is the Phoenix original’s, which New Times rated the best of its kind in the metro. The room is better than it needs to be. The risk is the ordinary one for a first-of-its-kind restaurant in a resort suburb: that the people who would love it do not know it is there. It is the 2020s opening we would most like to see still pouring coffee on Hayden Road in ten years.