Muya Restaurant

Injera came before the restaurant. In 2009, years before there was a dining room on Highland Road West, Wendessen Weldgiorgis was running a bakery that supplied the fermented Ethiopian flatbread to restaurants and grocers across Toronto and southwestern Ontario. Muya grew out of that bakery, opening in 2017 — strictly take-out at first, then expanding into the sit-down restaurant and small grocery it is today. The backstory matters because it is also the menu: this is a kitchen that built its name on the one element every Ethiopian meal rests on, and the food still treats injera as the foundation rather than the side.

The clearest way into that menu is a platter. Full Circle, the vegan sampler, gathers Shiro Wot — chickpea flour slow-simmered with Ethiopian spice — with Gomen collard greens, Misir Key Wot lentils in berbere, and Tikil Gomen, cabbage cooked down with potatoes and carrots, all of it laid over injera. The Adventure and Discover combos do the same work with meat in the mix. Order à la carte and the kitchen runs from Doro Wot, chicken braised in berbere, to Kitfo, freshly minced lean beef seasoned with mitmita, to Lamb Tibs and Zilzil Tibs — hand-carved beef sauteed with onion, garlic, and green pepper. Nothing arrives as a single plated entree; the meal is built to be torn, dipped, and shared.

The platter format makes the point on its own: this is a kitchen confident that its vegetable cooking can carry a meal. The vegan section is not a concession — Gomen, Misir Key Wot, Tikil Gomen, and Shiro Wot make a full, varied plate without borrowing from the meat side, which is why mixed tables work here without anyone settling. The same injera that anchors the vegan platter sets the pace for everyone else, turning dinner into something passed and shared rather than portioned out. It is social dining through food rather than spectacle.

Wendessen Weldgiorgis came to the work from Montreal, where local reporting traces an earlier small bakery and restaurant, before the 2009 injera operation drew him toward Kitchener. By the time local coverage profiled the Highland Road dining room, that bakery was sending thousands of pieces of injera into the Greater Toronto Area every month, the wholesale trade and the restaurant feeding each other. That double life — supplier and host — still shapes how Muya carries itself, a place run by someone who knows the bread as a business and as a ritual.

For all the ceremony, Muya stays an everyday restaurant. Prices sit at the casual end, and the food was built to travel long before the dining room existed: the stews, injera, and combo platters hold up as takeout the way they did when the place was strictly a take-out counter. A single order covers a lot of range without making the meal feel precious — a vegetable stew here, a combo platter there, injera to tie it together. It is the kind of menu a table comes back to on an ordinary week, not only for an occasion.

The thread that ties it together is coffee. Wendessen describes the Ethiopian coffee ceremony as communal by nature — buna is not a drink taken alone — and at Muya it runs as the slow close to a meal when there is time and the setup for it: beans roasted and ground, the boil, the small sini cups, incense and a shared pour. It is worth asking about in advance rather than expecting on every visit. Order the Full Circle, work through Doro Wot and Kitfo with enough injera to keep pace, and let the coffee land last — the same ritual the bakery was always quietly in service of.