A while back, I went to a Transformers convention here in Orlando with one of my closest friends. We went to high school together in Miami, and he was in town for the show, visiting from Tampa. He is a vegetarian, so afterwards, I suggested lunch at Selam Ethiopian and Eritrean Cuisine (https://www.ethiopianrestaurantorlando.com/), located at 5494 Central Florida Parkway in Orlando, just off International Drive and close to the Sea World theme park. I’ve only ever had Ethiopian food once before, a long time ago, at Orlando’s only other Ethiopian restaurant, Nile, which I need to get back to. But I had been hearing great things about Selam for years (including a Michelin recommendation), and it lived up to every bit of hype.
We started our epic lunch by sharing this order of two lentil samosas, fried to perfection in their thin, crispy shells. These were flatter triangles than the pyramid-like Indian samosas most of us are probably used to, with lighter, thinner shells that were more like spring roll wrappers than the empanada-like exteriors of Indian samosas. They were stuffed with a blend of lentils (a legume I love), onions, jalapenos, and herbs. Selam also offers samosas with minced beef or chicken, as an alternative to these vegetarian ones. 
The chunky hot sauce was absolutely delicious. I’d say it had a medium-hot spice level, so too much for my wife, parents, and in-laws, but not hot enough to make people run to the bathroom or beg for a glass of milk.
We each ordered lunch combination platters that are served on injera, which is a thin, sourdough-based bread that you rip apart with your hand and use it to scoop up or dip into various stewed meats and vegetables. It’s a similar concept to Turkish lavas bread and Indian naan, but the injera is much thinner, more like a crepe or a very thin pancake, and almost spongey in consistency. I’m always a little surprised Ethiopian food hasn’t caught on more as a mainstream cuisine, because Americans do love dipping things into other things. Be prepared to scoop and dip, because there are no utensils! The cuisine offers some of the most delicious vegetarian dishes I’ve ever tasted, and I say that as a committed omnivore.
This was my meat combination platter, which included four different meats. The green vegetables on the left are gomen besiga, a dish of sautéed collard greens with beef, ginger, garlic, onions, and jalapenos. I am a huge fan of collard greens, even though I didn’t grow up eating them, but now I am delighted to try every version I can, usually on barbecue and soul food menus. But these were like nothing else. To the right of the greens is ye beg wot, chunks of lamb stewed with onion, garlic, ginger, and turmeric. I love lamb and stewed meats in general, and that had so much flavor. 
The redder chunks of meat in the middle are beef wot, a similar stew made with beef that was a little spicier. (If I mixed up the lamb wot and beef wot, I apologize to everyone!) The dark red dish on the right with the hard-boiled egg (a pleasant surprise) is doro wot, a spicy chicken stew flavored by seasoned butter called niter kibbeh and a pretty spicy spice blend called berbere. After this meal, I bought a little thing of berbere at Penzey’s Spices, and I need to experiment with it more. That is homemade cottage cheese in the top right. I loved everything. I’m always excited to explore a new cuisine, and whenever a restaurant offers some kind of combo to let me sample multiple dishes and flavors, I will take that opportunity.
My friend did the same thing by ordering the vegetarian combination platter. That’s a little side salad on the left, followed by ye timatim fitfit, which is the injera bread chopped up and sauteed with fresh tomatoes, green chilies, onions, garlic, and herbs. It was cool to see how versatile the injera is, and kind of a meta thing to use the flat injera to scoop it up with, like dunking Oreos into cookies and cream ice cream. The next one over, the yellow-orange dish, is ye kik alicha wot, which is mild split peas stewed with onion, garlic, ginger, and turmeric. 
After that, the dark red is ye misir wot, with pureed split red lentils simmered in chopped onions, garlic, ginger, vegetable oil, and berbere sauce, so it was spicier than the split peas next to it. Next up is atakilt (vegetable) wot with the most delicious potatoes, carrots, green beans, onions, cabbage, and ginger, all stewed together. Finally, the vegetarian combo platter had ye gomen (collard green) wot on the right side, which was probably similar to my gomen besiga, only with no beef in this one.
My friend, who is always a generous guy, let me sample all of those, and I have to say that as tasty as my meats were, and how exciting it was to try all those unfamiliar flavors, the vegetarian combo blew them away with depths of flavor. If I was skilled enough to cook Ethiopian and Indian recipes well, I could probably go vegetarian, or at least eat vegetarian more often than I do, which is not as often as I should. But I recommend this highly to everyone, whether you eat meat or not, to demonstrate the absolute wonders and miracles you can achieve with vegetables and spices.
In fact, two years before I published this review, I listed Selam’s vegetarian combination platter in Top Tastes, where I listed my favorite local restaurant dishes of 2023 in Orlando Weekly, back when I was writing those every year. (Somehow we skipped 2024, and who knows what’s going to happen this year.)
I hardly ever drink coffee, but if you go to an Ethiopian restaurant, it almost feels like a necessity to do the traditional coffee ceremony, so we did. While I don’t pretend to be a coffee connoisseur, this was really delicious and strong coffee, with a depth of flavor I never notice in plain black American-style coffee. That said, I’ve never been into plain black coffee, and here at Selam, I needed some sugar in mine to mellow it out.
While this meal goes back a while, I remember it like it was yesterday. I kept holding off on publishing this review because I was hoping to return, ideally with other friends to try other dishes. Unfortunately, it is far from home, and Ethiopian food is a hard sell for most people I know (including my wife, who was brave enough to try it with me that one other time, 16 years ago, but it wasn’t her thing). But I give Selam my highest possible recommendation, whether you are familiar with the cuisine or completely uninitiated and a little intimidated. Don’t be intimidated! Everything was a hit, and it’s FUN. It would actually be a fun place to take a date, because you eat with one hand, which is kind of sensuous, and you share everything. But if any of my friends ever want to go to there on a weekend, I’m your huckleberry!
Today, Tyler offered two different kinds of sausages, his popular cheddar jalapeño sausage, and a hot gut sausage. I requested one of each in the Texas Trinity Platter, and they are both coarsely ground in natural casings (hence the “hot gut” moniker) that give you a satisfying crispy crunch sensation when you bite into them. They were both heavy and dense sausages, and with everything else we tried, I could only eat a small segment of each. The cheddar jalapeño was my favorite of the two, with pockets of oozing orange cheddar and a pleasant heat throughout.
They were generous with the scratch-made barbecue sauce, which is thin and vinegary, not the usual thick slurry of ketchup, high fructose corn syrup, and artificial smoke flavor like too many sauces.
Honestly, my favorite among all these pictured sides were the pickle slices and pink pickled onions in the top left corner of the box, and those actually came with the Texas Trinity Platter! I already love pickled onions (I make my own), and I am starting to consider myself more of a 
Man, was this some luscious larb! Listed under the “Salads” on the menu, it was so bright and tangy, sour and spicy, crunchy and funky, and surprisingly cool and refreshing, while spicy enough to make my lips tingle. It was served chilled, with thin slices of onion, finely shredded carrot, cucumbers, and lots of mint, and it exceeded all my expectations with its blend of flavors and textures. I was a little surprised the larb did not come with rice, but what do I know? Anyway, it made me a larb lover for life.
As always, I appreciated that Isan Zaap packed my takeout larb in one of those great plastic containers with a clear, locking lid. These are microwave-safe AND dishwasher-safe, and if you think I keep a collection of them, you’d be right as rain.
This was AWESOME. We both loved it. This was another dish with a crispy exterior and soft, yielding interior, kind of like fries or tater tots — not in taste, but in “mouth feel.” They were terrific with the sauce, and I liked the pickled vegetables (necessary ingredients on any banh mi sandwich) a lot.
My research tells me hu tieu is a Chinese-Cambodian invention that was adapted to Vietnamese tastes in the city of Saigon, and that I could have also ordered a “dry” version with a small bowl of soup on the side to protect my work clothes in the future.
To be completely honest, this was okay. I feel like I did not make the best choice. I might have been happier with pho or bun bo hue, but I kept thinking about how hot it was for soup (on a scorching August afternoon in Florida), and how it would be hard to beat 
I’ve slurped, scarfed, sipped, and supped on pho dac biet all over Orlando, so I wanted to try this as pure and unadulterated as possible. I didn’t add any sambal oelek, sriracha, or hoisin sauce to my pho, just the fresh basil, fresh jalapeño slices, and a healthy squirt of lime. And it was perfectly fine. It didn’t capture the majestic magnificence of my other 2023 discovery, 
I’ve always felt that pad Thai is a great dish for judging a new and/or unfamiliar Thai restaurant, along with my personal go-to Thai dish, pad kee mao, sometimes known as drunken noodles. I think my wife chose wisely, because she really loved Twenty Pho Hour’s version of pad Thai. She let me try a taste, and I liked it too.
She seemed to like them a lot, but she didn’t dig on the sweet chili sauce they came with. She greatly prefers the sweet peanut sauce that most other Vietnamese restaurants serve their summer rolls with. Little did we realize, Twenty Pho Hour also serves more traditional summer rolls with that peanut sauce, but oh well, lesson learned.
The Saboscrivner 