Simeon Wallis has a strong desire to connect to his culture, and connect his culture to others, through food. He founded Tizita Eats to do just that. Tizita is an Ethiopian pop-up focusing on three fundamental dishes in a cuisine that begs you to dive in with all five senses.
Ethiopian food is incredibly aromatic, leaning on fragrant herbs and spices to liven dishes. Wallis says some guests’ first interaction with Tizita is the smell wafting down the block. What they’re smelling is typically sega wat, a dish Wallis recommends to the uninitiated. It’s made of beef simmered in a rich tomato sauce with berbere and spiced butter and eaten with injera, a spongy flatbread perfect for sopping up the last bits of broth at the bottom of the bowl. In addition to sega wat, Tizita offers a vegetarian version called dinich with potatoes in place of beef, and misir, a spiced red lentil dish.
Tizita is an Amharic word that means “nostalgia.” In Ethiopian music, it refers to ballads about lost love, or specific melodies that evoke nostalgia in the listener. For Wallis, Tizita is a touchpoint to his culture. “I was adopted. So once I came here, I didn’t get Ethiopian food hardly at all until I came to UC and started going to the restaurants around here,” he says. “I didn’t have it for a long time, and so it felt fitting to call it Tizita, because I do long for this, for the experience that it brings.”
Wallis really started reconnecting with Ethiopian food during the pandemic when he was cooking for his friends often and working as a hospitality specialist at Somerset in Over-the-Rhine, a bar that hosts rotating pop-ups in their food bus. This connection laid the groundwork for Tizita’s first of many pop-ups at Somerset, as well as other bars around the city. Almost a decade in the service industry left Wallis with more than just a few transferable skills — it left him with dozens of connections that would bud into opportunities for his new business.
One of his more significant pop-up opportunities didn’t come from an industry connection, it came from his brother, who owns Big Chill in College Hill. Tizita established something of a residency there, popping up monthly alongside the bar’s fun snack menu, delicious cocktails and soft-serve walk-up window.
Wallis and his brother are just two members of a 23-person family. He and many of his siblings were adopted from Ethiopia and grew up partially in Africa and partially in Cincinnati. As an adult, Wallis has been able to reconnect with his heritage and share his culture with his family by cooking for them. “The more I make [Ethiopian food], the more me and my siblings and my family can enjoy it, but also just sharing it with my family and friends has been amazing,” he says.
Beyond its rich flavors and bold aromas, Ethiopian food is very tactile. Typically, meals are eaten with the hands, using injera in place of utensils. Taking flatware out of the equation removes the last small barrier between you and your food, allowing you to feel your meals in a whole new way. Though he offers flatware with all of his dishes, Wallis says some of his guests who are familiar with Ethiopian food forgo the utensils and use their hands instead.
It’s also a communal cuisine, where diners sit close together and share food to connect to one another. “We have this tradition called gursha, where you make a nice bite out of all the different flavors on the plate, and you feed it to someone that you want to recognize, that you love,” Wallis says.
Although an authentic communal eating space isn’t in the cards for Tizita right now, Wallis says he plans to offer coffee service, another strong point of connection in Ethiopian culture. Ethiopia is the largest coffee producer in Africa, and one of the largest in the world, and it’s well-known for cultivating award-winning coffees year after year. “In Ethiopia, you wake up — coffee. Midday — coffee. It’s a very hospitality-based culture, so coffee is a big part of it,” Wallis says. “We have a certain way that we make coffee and serve it, so I would eventually like to work that into [Tizita].”
Wallis has been surprised at the sheer amount of connections his customers have to Ethiopia, even if they’re not originally from the country. He recalls a time when a couple came to a Tizita Eats pop-up at Somerset after their anniversary dinner reservations fell through. They shared with Wallis that they both had connections to Ethiopia; one had lived there temporarily, the other worked at an Ethiopian restaurant in college, and both were pleasantly surprised to have serendipitously stumbled upon an authentic Ethiopian pop-up on their anniversary.
“It’s really cool to connect with people that I otherwise wouldn’t have any connections with,” Wallis says.
With a desire to connect his guests with his culture, Wallis hasn’t found it very difficult to get the word out about Tizita. Cincinnati has a penchant for rallying around food businesses that are testing out a concept or just getting off the ground. “[Tizita] has really snowballed from this little thing. I’m grateful to the people along the way who have given their time and resources to set me up where I am,” he says. “I’m grateful to the community I’m surrounded by.”
Tizita Eat’s next pop-up will be at Urban Artifact on May 3.
For more information about Tizita Eats, visit instagram.com/tizita_eats.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s March 19 print edition.
This article appears in Mar 19 – Apr 2, 2025.