Many people judge an Ethiopian restaurant by its vegetarian combination plate, and Ahadu chef and owner Menbere Medhane’s fossolia (green beans) earns hers high marks. But the restaurant’s kitfo, a dish of raw chopped beef bathed in warm spiced butter, shows off what really sets the restaurant apart from the city’s dozens of excellent Ethiopian spots.

Meat lovers should schedule their visits to the Pinehurst restaurant for Saturdays and Thursdays. Ahadu began as a butcher shop, and those are the days the beef arrives from Central Washington, freshly slaughtered that morning.

Much of the meat is sold fresh to customers. The rest goes to the kitchen, where Medhane sautés it with red onions and jalapeños for sizzling, spicy tibs and stews it with ginger and garlic for thick key wat. But the kitfo, silky with clarified butter and fragrant with chili-heavy mitmita spice mix, is the best dish for appreciating the freshness of the beef. (While the menu and servers will offer to cook it—lightly or fully—doing so diminishes the incredible texture of hand-chopped fresh beef.)

The kitfo comes with a side of fresh cheese, and, like all dishes here, arrives atop injera, the flatbread that serves as both plate and utensil. When used to pinch up the slightly warm kitfo and refreshingly cool cheese, it also acts as a gentle, sour foil to the richness of one of the city’s single best bites of food.