Washington calls itself the capital of the free world.
Its own residents have no vote in Congress. They pay federal income tax, among the highest per capita in the country, and are represented in the House by a delegate who cannot vote on the floor and in the Senate by nobody. The city has been printing the complaint on its license plates since 2000, when the Council replaced the old motto, Celebrate and Discover, with Taxation Without Representation. In 2016 they added the word End to the front. The capital of the free world has spent a quarter century driving around with a grievance on its bumper.
The presidential motorcade makes it worse. The plate went on under Clinton, came off under Bush, went back on under Obama, and came off again under Trump. The most powerful car in the country cannot hold a position on a bumper sticker from the city it is parked in.
Then there is the dining scene, which is organized around a four-year lease. The steakhouse. The expense account. The reservation that is secretly a meeting. A city where the regulars rotate out with every election and the room never has to get better, because nobody stays long enough to notice that it has not.
THE COMMUNITY THAT STAYED BUILT A NEIGHBORHOOD THE CITY HAD ALREADY GIVEN UP ON
Here is where the joke turns on us.
The Washington area has held the largest Ethiopian community outside Africa since the mid-1990s. Nobody agrees on the number. The 2010 census counted about 30,000 Ethiopian immigrants in the region, a fifth of every Ethiopian immigrant in the country. The embassy puts the figure closer to 200,000. The Ethiopian yellow pages for the District list over 1,200 Ethiopian-owned businesses, which is the kind of count that does not need a census to argue with.
They arrived in the seventies and settled on 18th Street in Adams Morgan. When rents rose in the mid-1990s they moved to the corner of Ninth and U, a stretch the city had largely abandoned after the 1968 riots, and opened no fewer than ten restaurants there within a few years. The corridor came back. The Council got around to formally naming it Little Ethiopia in December 2020, twenty-five years after the people who built it had already done so.
That is the actual Washington story. A city whose brand is transience was rebuilt block by block by the one community that decided to stay.
FOUR ADDRESSES, TWO CORRIDORS, AND EVERY ONE OF THEM INSIDE THE DISTRICT
Habesha Market, 1919 9th Street NW. Open at eight thirty in the morning, seven days, and the place to understand why the corridor works. Get the breakfast, the firfir and the kinche, or the sambusa and a combo platter that feeds three. The prices have not caught up to the reputation and hopefully never will.
Chercher, 1334 9th Street NW. A tight room that packs in more people than it should, and the food justifies the squeeze. The kitfo, the lamb ribs, the lentils, the honey wine. Open every day from half past eleven.
Dukem, 1114 U Street NW. On the block that made the corridor, with a terrace for the beef tibs and a kitchen that moves. Open from five on weekdays and from three on weekends.
Zenebech, 2420 18th Street NW. Adams Morgan, where the community first landed in the seventies. Goat, the vegetarian combo, the injera that people write paragraphs about. Confirm hours before you go.
Four addresses. Two corridors. Not one of them on the Mall, not one of them near a steakhouse, and every one of them inside the District, which is more than the tourism office manages when it points you at Virginia for dinner.
Washington, the plates are a good point and everyone knows it. But you built a city for people who leave, and the best thing in it was built by people who stayed, on a corner you had given up on, without anyone from the brochure noticing for twenty-five years.
Keep the plates. The people who stayed are on Ninth Street.
SOURCING
National Archives, Prologue, on District residents lacking voting representation in Congress and the Taxation Without Representation slogan appearing on license plates beginning in 2000. archives.gov
WETA Boundary Stones, on the 2000 license plate redesign replacing Celebrate and Discover, and the plate being added and removed from presidential vehicles across administrations. weta.org
Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, on the slogan being added under Clinton, removed under Bush, restored under Obama and removed under Trump. norton.house.gov
History.com, on the 2016 update to End Taxation Without Representation. history.com
WETA Boundary Stones, on Ethiopian immigrants settling in Adams Morgan, moving to Ninth and U in the mid-1990s, opening no fewer than ten restaurants, and the Washington area holding the largest Ethiopian concentration outside Africa by the mid-1990s. weta.org
Wikipedia, on the 2000 census count, the embassy estimate near 200,000, and Ethiopian business ownership in Shaw since the 1980s. wikipedia.org
KAMA DC, on the D.C. Council formally naming the Ninth and U corridor Little Ethiopia in December 2020. kamadc.org
Operator addresses and hours confirmed September 28, 2026. Zenebech hours not published at time of check.
