A newly opened restaurant at 1534 Bardstown Road is introducing Louisville diners to slow-cooked stews, spiced raw beef tartare, and a coffee ritual that involves roasting beans. Mimi's Ethiopian Restaurant & Bar, opened by Yodit “Mimi” Woldetsadik and Yared Hailemariam on Wednesday, August 5, has settled into the Deer Park corridor with a menu built around Ethiopian cuisine.
Woldetsadik wants guests to experience authentic Ethiopian cuisine, warm hospitality, and memorable dining moments, according to WDRB, whose morning features reporter Keith Kaiser tried the new restaurant on Bardstown Road. Opening a restaurant of her own had long been a personal dream for Woldetsadik, whose husband works as a cardiologist at Baptist Health Louisville, according to Food & Dining Magazine.
The menu leans on dishes prepared from scratch, including doro wat, a slow-cooked chicken and egg stew seasoned with berbere spice and caramelized onions that stands as Ethiopia's national dish, and kitfo, a traditional spiced minced raw beef tartare, per the same account. Ethiopian cuisine broadly relies on rich, flavorful stews called wat, seasoned with berbere spice blends and served atop injera, a spongy sourdough flatbread made from teff flour, WDRB's report notes. Traditionally, injera is used to scoop up portions of meat, lentils, and vegetables rather than eating with utensils, and Ethiopian diners eat food with their hands as part of that custom.
A Coffee Ceremony and a Full Weekly Schedule
Beyond the entrees, Mimi's also offers a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony, a social ritual involving washing and roasting green coffee beans, hand-grinding them, and brewing them in a traditional clay pot, the magazine reports. The restaurant is open Monday through Thursday from 4 to 9 p.m., Friday from 4 to 10 p.m., Saturday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Diners unfamiliar with eating injera by hand need not worry about being locked into one approach. At Queen of Sheba, local restaurant critics note that diners can be offered silverware or separate plating, according to LouisvilleHotBytes.
Filling a Gap in Louisville's Ethiopian Dining Scene
Mimi's arrival adds to the East African culinary offerings in the metro area. Diners seeking authentic Ethiopian food have found options including Queen of Sheba, which opened on Taylorsville Road in 2004, and Abyssinia Ethiopian Restaurant downtown on South 5th Street, per GoToLouisville. Hoodline previously spotlighted the stews at Queen of Sheba, and also included it among the city's top vegetarian-friendly destinations.
A Building With Its Own Louisville Story
The address itself carries plenty of local history. Before it became a restaurant space, 1534 Bardstown Road was famous as the storefront for independent record store Ear X-tacy, which relocated in 2010 and closed for good in 2011, according to the University of Louisville Oral History Center. The building's history is part of the address's local story.
After Ear X-tacy departed, the space became a Panera Bread, which closed in June 2020. Property owners then directly recruited local restaurant operators to convert the vacant Panera into I Love Tacos later that year, according to WDRB's earlier reporting on the pandemic-era leasing shift. Tacos D'Amor preceded Mimi's and later closed.
The Deer Park block is seeing broader change beyond Mimi's arrival. Next door at 1514 Bardstown Road, the former Mark's Feed Store location is being converted into Prado 264, an incoming Cuban-Italian fusion restaurant, according to Food & Dining Magazine's coverage of the corridor.
