Aster’s sits under IH-35 on the north end of campus in a shabby green house with Ethiopian knick-knacks on the walls and Astroturf on the floor of the semi-outside dining room. The clientele is mostly grad students, professors, and first dates happy to be somewhere cheap but still unique enough to earn the treater bonus points for exoticism.

Incredibly priced combo plates come with a ton of food. Use injera bread as your utensil (teff, the grain it’s made from, is full of vitamins and amino acids)—but beware, it fills you up. Some days, it’s more delightfully sour than others. Usually, execution is excellent; at worst, it’s a bit greasy and heavy, but still enjoyable. Manchet abesh, ground beef simmered with spices, has a vivid and unexpected flavor of preserved lemon to counterbalance the garlicky meat. Doro wot, the national dish, features a tender chicken drumstick and earthy berbere sauce, with the requisite over-boiled egg. Lentils in all their forms are great; alicha miser resembles dal, and keyi miser is rich and complex. Collards are vinegary sweet, and cinnamon-spiced eggplant leaves us hardly missing meat. Vegetarians will be ecstatic here.

Waiters are decked out in traditional dress, Ethiopian music plays on the speakers, and decades-old travel agency posters are everywhere. But the cheese factor is just one more thing to love.