Tsion Café

On our lists of the best live music venues and activities in New York.

Tsion Cafe fills its Sugar Hill storefront with African art, a piano, and a shelf of books up front, then opens onto a backyard visitors single out for date night. Chef Beejhy Barhany, who also founded the Beta Israel of North America Cultural Foundation, works the room herself most nights and moved the kitchen to a kosher vegan menu after years of serving dishes like filet mignon. The plates lean traditional Ethiopian: injera, sambusa, wot, messer, shiro, atakilt, and gomen, plus a vegetarian combo built around injera as the only utensil. Poetry nights and live music turn up often enough that regulars check the calendar before they check the menu.