First-timers arriving at the West Adams complex that Rose Previte spent six years creating can be forgiven a bit of confusion if their destination is “Maydan.” Are you headed to the food hall, or the restaurant?
Maydan Market is what Previte calls the whole of her incredible 10,000-square-foot project inside a former factory for the very niche specialty of coin-collector pages. Underneath its exposed beams of wood and steel, seven dining options now orbit a central hearth wrapped in bronze.
For six of the vendors — serving cuisines that encompass regional Mexican, Thai and Cal-Med — the setup is casual. Settle at a tiled table, zap the QR code and scroll through menu pages. In minutes you can be twirling a fork around pad Thai from the team behind Holy Basil and then reach with both hands for a giant, crackling wedge of L.A.’s most celebrated tlayuda.
Maydan L.A., on the other hand, is the market’s sole full-service restaurant, located in the back of the space. It’s partitioned by a long, tiled bar along the left wall, situated behind the hearth and its surrounding oval counter and framed, aesthetically, by double Moroccan doors painted in hypnotic geometries. A mural of a vineyard meanders over pale brick and around two picture windows.
These are visual clues to the cultures that Previte threads as a chef, seasoned traveler and restaurateur. Her talents at combining foods from a broad swath of the map into a cohesive narrative is the restaurant’s greatest strength, and also its guidepost for possibilities yet to be realized. More on that in a minute.
“Maydan” is Previte’s shibboleth. It’s the name of the career-defining restaurant she opened in Washington, D.C., in 2017, and of her cookbook published by Abrams in 2023. The term also feels like her culinary GPS coordinates. “Pronounced ‘MY-dahn,’ ‘MAY-dahn’ or ‘MI-dan,’ the word is used throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, Central and South Asia, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and North Africa,” she writes in her book: “It means the same thing everywhere: a central public meeting place, often in the middle of a city. A space for people to come together as a community to celebrate, to mourn, to rebel.”
Place a pin on Beirut as a starting point. Previte’s mother has Lebanese roots, and Maydan anchors us there while incorporating other foodways she’s come to know through her roaming and research. Before the original D.C. location began serving customers, she and its founding co-chefs Chris Morgan and Gerald Addison toured Morocco, Tunisia, Georgia, Lebanon and Turkey, often learning from home cooks and recognizing live-fire cooking as a unifying factor. These influences, fueled by blazing hearths, continue to inform Maydan’s direction.
My best advice? Come with a group.
Servers steer diners toward a $95-per-person family-style prix fixe labeled “tawleh” (“table” in Arabic). The spread involves hummus and other dips; a round of mouneh (pickled or preserved vegetables) and leafy salads; a few small plates and, the one big decision, one platter to share, opting between meats or fish or a head of spiced, roasted cauliflower.
If you’re the type who bristles at being sold a package deal — me too — most everything included with the tawleh, and more, is available a la carte. But over multiple meals I’ve come to value the curation of this option. Previte understands how to package a selection of dishes to deliver the most consistent, nourishing experience, satisfying in both its unity and variety.
Plenty of plush flatbread baked in a clay oven will arrive to accompany the mezze. Swipe it through the hummus, balanced in tahini and lemon, and mulchy muhammara twanging with pomegranate molasses, and casik, the Turkish variation of the region’s ubiquitous herbed yogurt and cucumber dip. Alternate bites of pickled turnips with sprigs of mint and lush honey-soaked dates.
The first of the small plates to always disappear: halloumi, burnished coppery in the fire and showered with peanut and sesame dukkah, which crunches audibly against the squeaky cheese.
Among centerpiece mains, I love the sayyadiah, a riff on a coastal Lebanese and Palestinian staple of spiced fish and rice. Branzino, grilled to crisp-edged precision, is slathered with shatta, a chunky hot sauce (this one is milder than most) and scented with orange, cumin and lemony sumac. Grab the side of tahina, a traditional pairing, for another layer of flavor and texture.
Or the mood might call for ripping into smoky lamb shoulder, rubbed with baharat (Lebanese seven spice) and rendered to a consistency somewhere wonderfully between melty and ropy. The meat plays well with all the condiments you can throw at it — harissa, chermoula with a fleeting whiff of saffron, tahina, even toum, the garlic emulsion classically meant for poultry — while you swipe through the last swirls of dip and pass the final shards of bread.
If you are inclined to order wine, the by-the-glass options make for easy drinking, but the thoughtfully annotated bottle list covers much more compelling territory. A wine import company is among Previte’s endeavors, and she mirrors the food by bringing in lesser-seen varietals from Lebanon and Georgia.
Bruce Childress, Maydan Market’s director of restaurants, will swoop in with gracious suggestions across price points and tastes preferences. Childress brings a consummate sense of hospitality to the restaurant, as does beverage director Danny Rubenstein, whose big-hearted presence plenty of us recall at Here’s Looking at You.
Circling back to Maydan L.A.’s a la carte menu, I could drill down on some quibbles: the Omani-style shrimp cooked to mealiness and with none of the promised zing of dried lime; an odd squash mélange where any tang seems to have been bleached from its goat cheese sauce.
I feel a greater pull, though, to think through the restaurant’s further potential. The menu, arriving at this moment in the city’s food culture, lands as familiar. Likable. Safe.
When I reviewed Maydan in D.C.during my years as Eater’s national critic, I had a special called tehan: ground goat, channeled from street food Previte and her the team shared in the Medina of Marrakech, which combined the heart, liver and other trimmed meats, simmered to harmony and brightened with harissa and preserved lemon. Intense, intricate and also simple, it was one of the most wondrous things I ate during that era. It was a bridge. It tasted of somewhere.
This isn’t about fetishizing offal. This is about the leap toward specificity, to diving below the surface of the most broadly appealing, easy-to-synthesize dishes — the ones, from any nation’s cuisine, that rarely make their way into restaurant repertoires.
Los Angeles has the basics of Eastern Mediterranean covered (and for ultra-smooth hummus, no one has yet to beat Bavel or Saffy’s) and far too few examples of excellent North African cooking. Maydan could be a place to fill the voids, to make cultures too often dehumanized in the U.S. more tangible, to yank us out of our digital fogs.
Given her background, and the recipes in her cookbook, and in Maydan D.C.’s early direction, Previte understands this. Raised by a Lebanese cook, she knows the good jolt of hindbe, a winter dish of bitter greens puckery with lemon and tempered with caramelized onions. She knows loubieh bil zeit, a dish of flat Romano beans slow-cooked in olive oil, often with whole garlic cloves and sometimes with cinnamon. It makes you sigh with summery joy. Romano beans don’t flourish everywhere. They do in Lebanon, and in California.
Previte keeps a lot on her plate. She’s still opening businesses in D.C. Maydan Market, all told, is a triumph. When she’s ready for her next adventure, I hope she plumbs what more her restaurant could bring to Los Angeles that we don’t yet have. I hope she chooses to go deep, rather than far.
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