Taste of Ethiopia is closing its South Congress Avenue restaurant in South Austin after 12 years, with co-owners Woinee Mariam and Solomon Hailu citing a punishing rise in the cost of doing business in one of the city's hottest commercial corridors. The restaurant's lease at 3801 South Congress Avenue, Suite 107, expires September 30, and the couple has decided not to renew it.
Hailu said South Congress has become too expensive for the restaurant's means, according to reporting from CultureMap Austin. Mariam told the outlet that the cost of food, labor, and rent has changed significantly in recent years, with employee, grocery, and other operating costs now running three to four times higher than they were four or five years ago. Rent alone, she said, is about three times higher than it used to be.
The South Congress location sits inside Debut SoCo, a 55,000-square-foot mixed-use development beneath a 374-unit residential building directly across from St. Edward's University, according to CommercialCafe. The property's owners poured more than $1.5 million into building improvements in 2025, including exterior paint upgrades and EV charging stations meant to attract retail tenants, the same report notes.
A Corridor Getting Pricier by the Year
Commercial retail rents along South Congress now average $30 to $40 per square foot or more, with small ground-floor storefronts commanding $2,000 to $4,500 a month, per data compiled by Storefront. Rapid population and commercial growth along the corridor has pushed those rates steadily upward over the past decade, squeezing independent operators like Taste of Ethiopia out of long-held storefronts.
The pressure on South Congress hospitality businesses has shown up elsewhere in 2026, too. The South Congress Hotel temporarily closed and laid off staff members in March for extensive renovations following a Hyatt acquisition completed in December 2025, Hoodline previously reported on the fallout. Nearby, developer SomeraRoad is overhauling the 10-acre Twin Oaks Shopping Center at South Congress and Oltorf into a 90,000-square-foot retail and dining center slated to open by 2028, a project Hoodline detailed in a report on the site's shift away from earlier plans for high-density residential towers.
Ethiopian Food and Culture on South Congress
Taste of Ethiopia opened its South Congress location 12 years ago after customer demand convinced Mariam and Hailu to expand south from their original Pflugerville restaurant. The South Austin outpost became a way to share Ethiopian food and culture with the Austin community, building relationships with generations of customers along the way, according to CultureMap Austin's reporting.
The menu leaned on traditional Ethiopian staples: hand-rolled injera flatbread made daily from teff flour, doro wat chicken stew simmered in berbere spices, and communal platters served in woven mesob baskets, according to a Tribeza profile of the business. Mariam founded the original Pflugerville restaurant at 1100 Grand Avenue Parkway in 2011 after immigrating from Ethiopia to Washington, D.C. as a teenager and gaining kitchen experience at Copeland's of New Orleans, the profile notes. That Pflugerville location will remain open after the South Congress closure.
Back in 2020, a neighborhood analysis ranked the South Congress restaurant among the top four local businesses in South Austin's St. Edward's district, with a Hoodline feature highlighting a 4.5-star rating across hundreds of reviews and popular dishes like doro wot and lamb tibs.
A Shrinking Map for Ethiopian Dining
The closure further narrows Austin's already limited roster of standalone Ethiopian restaurants. Aster's Ethiopian Restaurant, a campus-area staple open since 1991, closed around 2024, leaving Habesha on North Lamar among the few remaining central options, according to discussion on Reddit's Austin food community.
Mariam said she's trying not to pass higher costs on to customers even as the couple searches for another Austin location. Their next move may echo a broader pattern among independent restaurant operators, who are increasingly looking to corridors parallel to South Congress, such as South First Street, where casual dining concepts have proliferated through 2025 and 2026, Hoodline reported in coverage of a sushi burrito shop's recent opening there.
