Walk into Dama Restaurant and Pastry off Columbia Pike in Arlington, and you’ll probably find a group of regulars sipping coffee, splitting pastries, and chatting with one of the owners.

People gather at the Ethiopian establishment at all hours of the day because it has a lot to offer, particularly to members the D.C. region’s Ethiopian diaspora. Dama is part café, part restaurant, and part market and was opened decades ago by a group of siblings from central Ethiopia who had their community in mind.

At the market, customers can purchase injera or teff flour to make their own spongy bread, along with other Ethiopian staples. They can also pick up newspapers printed in Amharic, plus business cards and flyers of those offering legal and social services in both Amharic and English.

The cafe serves traditional American breakfast like French toast or Ethiopian breakfast like chechebsa (which is spiced torn flatbread), while the restaurant has classic Ethiopian dishes like tibs (cubed beef with onions, jalapenos, and spices) and kitfo (a finely chopped raw beef dish).

“This is a place where the community comes together and that is the part I love most,” co-owner Hailu Dama tells DCist/WAMU.

Dama Restaurant and Pastry is also where all of the Dama siblings come together. Hailu is usually tending to a customer, while his sister, Almaz Dama, is in the back kitchen, baking pastries. Almaz arrives at the café at 6 a.m. to prepare deep fried dough dishes like chornake (which are large circular pastries) and bonbolino (which is similar to a donut but less sweet). She also makes cakes, like coffee  velvet and chocolate raspberry, even vegan ones that taste remarkably similar despite not having any eggs or dairy.

“I’m very passionate about it,” Almaz says of baking. “The smell of the vanilla, the almond — it’s just like a one million dollar perfume for me.”

Dama has become a mainstay of the Ethiopian community, evidenced by the number of customers — even during slower business times like a weekday midmorning.

It first opened in 1982, during a wave of Ethiopian immigration prompted by a coup and civil war in the African country. Hailu and Almaz’s big sister, Yeshi Dama, opened the restaurant on North Capitol Street in D.C. a decade after migrating to the city herself. Her siblings joined her at the business shortly thereafter. But Yeshi, who’s semi-retired now in Columbia, Maryland, had to close the family business just four years later; they’d been priced out of the city.

But more than a decade later, another sibling, Kelem Dama, stumbled upon a new home for the family business while she was on her way to work in Arlington.

“I prayed to God,” Kelem says. “Then he told me in my dream that he’s going to give me the right place.”

In 1999, the siblings re-opened their restaurant on Columbia Pike. A year later, they created a café within the restaurant, complete with Almaz’s baked goods.

Those baked goods and the cafe help set Dama apart from other Ethiopian restaurants, the family says. Almaz was hesitant to open the cafe at first — there was no shortage of American bakeries around, she says she pointed out at the time — but Hailu encouraged the move because it was in keeping with Dama’s family-friendly vibe. (For example: The restaurant did not offer alcoholic beverages until recently.)

Almaz’ cakes also help her stay connected with customers. She finds herself baking cakes for someone’s baptism and then their high school graduation. She expects to bake their wedding cake too.

The Dama family has continued to adapt their business in order to stay open. For example, they added a vegetarian buffet for lunch on weekdays after customers requested more plant-based options for religious reasons, says Almaz. Dama now also caters special occasions such as birthdays, graduations, and weddings.

As for the next growth opportunity, Hailu would like to open a second location in Maryland, home to the largest concentration of Ethiopians in the region.

To stay connected with the community, Dama hosts community events like back-to-school drives, according to Hailu’s wife, Amsale Saire Selassie. She says Yeshi set the tone for Dama by always helping anyone in need.

“Whether they’re Ethiopians or anybody else, she would let them into her house and help. So that’s our base,” Saire Selassie says.

The siblings love what they do, but admit running Dama seven days per week is challenging. They work long days and are always on call. The only time they took a break was during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Dama was closed for two months. But those times were challenging too. Hailu says they lost many good friends who were also customers to the virus.

The siblings don’t expect to work at the restaurant forever. But they expect Dama to stay in the family. Kelem’s 25-year-old daughter, Rita Mulugeta, is interested in taking over the family business. She started helping out in high school, as the cashier, but now runs the catering business with her mom.

Mulugeta says she was hesitant to work at Dama at first. But the community her family created keeps her there. Every time she walks into the café or restaurant, she says she is greeted by a familiar face.

“Honestly, I feel like coming to Dama feels like coming home,” Mulugeta says. “Real things do last, and that’s exactly what this business is.”