Rade's Restaurant

At Rade's, a plate of injera and slow-cooked Eritrean beef can land on the same table as a chicken shawarma and a margherita pizza, and the range is autobiography rather than indecision. Owner-chef Okuba Tesfa cooks Habesha food — the shared Eritrean and Ethiopian table of injera, tibs, and long-simmered stews — in downtown Kitchener, a short walk from the Kitchener Market. The name is a family one: Rade is spelled from the first initials of four children. It tells you most of what to expect before the food arrives — a kitchen that takes the cooking seriously and the diner as they come, the one who came in for Chacha and injera and the one who wants something they can already picture.

The Habesha plates are where the kitchen is most itself. Chacha is the clearest centrepiece — bone-in beef cooked slow with onions, garlic, peppers, and tesmi, the spiced clarified butter that runs through much of the menu, served with injera to tear and scoop. Around it sit the tibs, Keyh Tibs and Tsada Tibs, both beef with onions and peppers but pitched at different heat. Kitfo comes as seasoned ground beef with garlic and corrorima; Gored Gored keeps the beef raw and thick-cut; Dulet works lamb tripe with cumin and green pepper. Quanta Fitfit shreds injera into spiced dry beef with butter and yogurt, a dish meant for eating with the hands. Shiro and the Veggie Mix — red lentils, chickpeas, collard greens, cabbage, and green peas under a lentil sauce — give vegetarians a full plate rather than a side to make do with.

That breadth is deliberate, not a hedge against a slow night. Alongside the Habesha plates the menu carries shakshuka, a chicken shawarma wrap, hummus, foul, pasta in rosé, bolognese, and alfredo, pizzas, even poutine — and a house fajita, beef or chicken with onions and peppers and sliced bread, that answers to no single tradition. The pizzas range from a plain margherita to an alfredo base topped with spinach, chili, and an egg. The arrangement lets a cautious first-timer start with shakshuka or shawarma and cross into tibs and injera by the second plate, while a family combo feeds three from the one kitchen. A nervous diner and a homesick one can share the same order.

The kitchen opens early and runs all day, which widens what the place is for. Mornings bring a breakfast table that leans Middle Eastern — shakshuka with mushrooms and chickpeas, foul under a peanut-and-tomato sauce, a three-egg omelette, hummus with warm sliced bread. Pickup and delivery run alongside the tables, and family combos are sized to feed three, so a weeknight order travels home as easily as it lands in the dining room. A quick breakfast, a market-day lunch, and a slow dinner all come out of the same kitchen.

The range makes sense once you know the cook. Okuba Tesfa is Eritrean, and before Kitchener he spent more than fifteen years in kitchens, much of it as a sous-chef in Israel working Italian and Middle Eastern restaurants — a history carried in local reporting and the family's own account. When he opened Rade's in 2020, the pasta, the pizza, and the shawarma were not borrowed to widen the net; they were dishes already in his hands, set beside the Eritrean and Ethiopian food he grew up eating. The menu is a biography before it is a list.

What ties the morning, the comfort plates, and the Habesha cooking together is the coffee. Jebena coffee and corrorima carry a Habesha coffee ceremony that turns the end of a meal into its own slow event, the same cultural line the main dishes draw. Chacha with injera to start and the coffee to finish — at Rade's, the cooking and the closing come from the same hands.