The Blue Nile: What’s Vegetarian Editorial Review

The Blue Nile in Ferndale runs a separate Vegetarian Feast on its own menu, all you can eat for $20.90, which makes it one of the easiest meatless dinners in metro Detroit.

This is an Ethiopian restaurant, so the format is the format. Dishes arrive together on a shared platter lined with injera. You tear the bread and eat with your hands. There’s no cutlery and no separate plate. Ethiopian cooking splits cleanly into meat dishes and vegetable dishes. Blue Nile prints them as two separate feasts instead of burying the vegetables at the bottom of the page. The restaurant opens only for dinner, and the reason it gives is that the kitchen spends the day cooking.

What you get in the Vegetarian Feast

Eight dishes, and $20.90 covers all of them except one. Metin Shiro Wat is ground roasted yellow split peas cooked in berbere. That’s the chile and spice blend behind the heat and the color. Yemisir Kik Wat does the same thing with split red lentils and comes out spicier. Kik Alecha is the mild counterweight, pureed yellow split peas with onions and herbs. Reach for it between bites of the hot dishes.

Greens and vegetables fill out the platter. Gomen is chopped spiced greens with onions, garlic and jalapeno. Tekil Gomen is cabbage cooked the same way. Atakilt Wat brings potatoes, carrots and green beans into one dish. It’s usually the first thing a table finishes. Defen Yemisir Azifa arrives chilled, pureed lentils blended with spices and herbs. Good palate reset partway through.

Timatim Salata is the one that costs extra, $8 on top of the feast price. It’s romaine, tomatoes, onions and jalapenos in lemon juice and olive oil. Worth it if you want something raw and sharp on a platter that’s otherwise all slow-cooked, and skippable if you don’t.

What to ask about

This is a meat-serving restaurant, and the Ethiopian Feast on the other half of the menu is the reason most tables are here. Vegetable dishes get their own platter. Nothing published says anything about separate pans or prep space, so ask if that matters to you.

Vegans have one specific question to ask: whether any of the vegetable dishes are cooked in niter kibbeh, the spiced clarified butter that shows up in many Ethiopian kitchens. None of the eight menu descriptions mention it, and the kitchen can tell you. Same question for the injera. It starts with teff but often gets wheat flour mixed in, so treat it as containing gluten unless staff confirms otherwise.

The practical stuff

The Blue Nile is at 545 W. 9 Mile Road in Ferndale, MI 48220, and the number is (248) 547-6699. Doors open 5 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Dine-in and carry-out both work. The Detroit Free Press named it a 2025 Restaurant of the Year Classic, and the kitchen has been cooking from scratch here for more than 30 years.

Bring people who like to share and skip the individual entree math. One price, one platter, eight vegetable dishes, and nobody at the table has to order around the menu.