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A catchall term like “food hall” doesn’t quite capture the essence of the multi-vendor project that Washington, D.C., restaurateur and cookbook author Rose Previte opened in October after six years of planning.
“Collective”’ sounds a little, well, collectivist — but really that is closer to the communal spirit of Maydan Market. Within 10,000 square feet of a former factory in West Adams, Previte has created a space for her sit-down restaurant, Maydan L.A. (see my separate review here), and seven counters each with their own visual and culinary identity, serving customers either right in front of them or at tables collected in the room’s central court. A QR-code system allows you to mix and match.
Two vendors, Lugya’h and Maléna, showcase meaningful evolutions for the talents behind some of L.A.’s most iconic street foods. Golden Mountain Chicken highlights a fresh direction for the married team behind some of the city’s most innovative Thai restaurants. Sook, a combination corner shop and wine bar, and Compass Rose, an all-day cafe, express Previte’s Lebanese heritage and the regions between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus where she culturally centers much of her cooking.
The last corner is an idea that brilliantly feeds L.A.’s culinary tributaries. It’s a wild card called Club 104, a space for pop-ups that generally run a few weeks at a time. The market’s first six months have already featured Palestinian knafeh, a Jamaican-inspired fried fish sandwich and Persian fesenjoon.
Like any restaurant or restaurant-adjacent business, it takes time for the working parts to click and settle. It’s been a privilege to visit the market weekly over the past few months, noting dishes being tweaked and menus adjusting for the better. At the six-month mark, the chefs feel in collective peak form, and the crowds, particularly on consistently busy weekends, seem to be adapting the place as part of their community.
Occasionally I’ll plan to meet a friend at the market and find them standing near the entrance, staring inside with an expression recalling the sensory overwhelm of a first day at school. It feels right, as a means of guidance, to name my top 10 dishes at Maydan Market. It’s only a start. If you keep coming back, you’ll find your own ways into the collective.
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1. Poncho’s tlayuda at Lugya’h
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The tlayudas shaped and grilled by Alfonso “Poncho” Martinez start with a 14-inch tortilla that come from Oaxaca, made by families who have been farming, milling and nixtamalizing corn for generations. Their colors might be milky white, bright gold, faded pink or a dusky, calming shade that defines “cornflower blue.” Martinez and his crew brush on asiento (freshly toasted lard) and spread over black bean refritos simmered with garlic, onion and avocado leaves. Next comes quesillo, the Oaxacan cheese pulled into lacy webs, and handfuls of shredded cabbage. The tortilla softens and blisters over the flames of white oak logs.
Martinez, who is Zapotec, grew up with cooks in Oaxaca’s Central Valleys who folded tlayudas into fan shapes, so that’s how he serves them. Order up to three meats alongside: tasajo (a quickly cured strip of flank steak), a couple brick-red bulbs of chorizo and, the rarity, moronga, an exceptional herbed blood sausage, its recipe a wedding gift to Martinez from the father of his wife and business partner Odilia Romero.
For nearly a decade, minus a couple years lost to the pandemic, Martinez and Romero served what Los Angeles affectionately came to know as “Poncho’s tlayudas” during Friday night pop-ups in the yard of a house in South Los Angeles. It’s profound — for devotees of what might arguably be the city’s greatest expression of Oaxacan cuisine, and also for Martinez himself, whose presence at Maydan Market is constant — that one of L.A.’s defining, ephemeral dishes can now be savored six days a week for lunch or dinner. Its accessibility only amplifies its specialness.
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2. Pozole flight at Maléna
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Maria Elena Lorenzo and her husband, Juan Irra, have been operating Tamales Elena y Antojitos in Watts for decades, selling Lorenzo’s nourishing tamales (and eventually tacos and other dishes) first from carts and then from a food truck they bought in 2007 and continue to operate. In 2020, the couple’s daughters spearheaded a restaurant of the same name in Bell Gardens, showcasing the family’s Afro-Mexican cooking of Costa Chica, a stretch along the southern coast of the state of Guerrero between Acapulco and the border of Oaxaca. It closed after a sporadic two-year run, and the biggest tragedy for L.A. was the sudden absence of its pozole verde, a family recipe that involved a broth of pork and chicken and a puree of tomatillos, serranos, pumpkin seeds, cilantro and other herbs that tint the soup the pale green of Haas avocado flesh. The flavors were orchestral: woodwind bass notes from the slowly simmered meats, reedy octave leaps from the aromatics.
The daughters — Judept Irra, Heidie Irra, Maria Irra, Nayeli Irra, and Teresa Irra — pitch in to run Maléna, and the pozole is back. You can order a full bowl of mild pozole blanco; the pozole verde comes only as one of three smaller bowls in a flight with pozole blanco and chile-stained poloze rojo, arranged on a long wooden board to represent the colors of the Mexican flag.
The kitchen, if requested, dresses the pozole with its whirlwind of garnishes (including radishes, chopped cabbage, avocado and fried tortillas), but the trio can also be ordered with those ingredients on the side. The differences in taste between them are both subtle and stark, and I’m betting, like me, you’ll tip out the final drops of verde first.
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3. Lebanese breakfast at Compass Rose
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The patio setting of Compass Rose is currently the only arm of the market that opens early, at 8 a.m. The selection of coffee drinks is extensive and the food menu is concise, though it features a morning meal that Los Angeles has largely been missing: a Lebanese spread of man’oushe, its puffy surface crowded with za’atar and olive oil, alongside swirled labneh, a block of feta and a plate of sliced cucumbers, tomatoes and olives. In combined bites, the salty ingredients season the fresh ones, and the textures are varied enough to gently nudge the brain awake. If you want to add in a sweet element, order the pistachio bun from among the handful of pastry options.
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4. Khao soi at Golden Mountain Chicken
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Wedchayan “Deau” Arpapornnopparat and Tongkamal “Joy” Yuon, the chefs behind the city’s three thriving Holy Basil restaurants, recently switched the format of their Maydan Market outlet from a barbecued meats focus to fried chicken and noodles. They score. L.A. by no means lacks for khao soi, but this one is a welcome addition. A healthy dosing of red curry paste infuses the coconut curry broth with some assertive complexity. The chefs opt for a thinner fried noodles that soften more quickly in the soup, and, rather than the inclusion of a more traditional whole chicken leg, the meat is chopped into pieces. These adjustments register as kindnesses, not shortcuts.
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5. Mole de pavo at Lugya’h
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At Lugya’h, Martinez delves into the Oaxacan repertoire well beyond tlayudas. On a candy-bright ceramic plate, as one standout example, a staffer will deliver a prehistoric-looking turkey leg draped in mole. Its color fluctuating somewhere between red, coppery brown and inky black, the mole pings with the emblematic smokiness of chiles and earthiness of nuts and spices, but he swivels its flavor spectrum with fruits: raisins, apples, pineapple, prunes, bananas. Depending on the season, he might throw in plums or blueberries. The turkey meat can maintain some give, but in a satisfying way that pulls the indigenous bird out of its homogenized Thanksgiving context. Alongside is a gorgeous tamale, striated into thin layers of pureed beans and masa. It’s steamed in both banana and avocado leaves, leaving behind a finely grained, fossil-like imprint and a halo of herbal fragrance.
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6. Quesatacos de barbacoa at Maléna
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There must be tacos. The Irra sisters perform the public service of nailing their quesatacos: ropy beef suspended in slicks of melted cheese, portions of which have been griddled to the all-important caramelized orange lacquer. Consommé and salsa verde add their dimensions. An alternate suggestion: pescadillas, fish tacos that seal in the fryer like tightly closed clam shells, another specialty reflecting the family’s Afro-Mexican cooking from Guerrero’s Costa Chica.
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7. Khachapuri at Compass Rose
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Everyone’s favorite Georgian flatbread, tapered like a canoe and filled with salty cheese in its center, was the breakout hit at Rose Previte’s original Compass Rose, opened in Washington, D.C., in 2014. To be fair, Previte was early to khachapuri’s popular ascent, and her version is textbook. A Market staffer delivers the bread immediately from the oven, and if they’re not too slammed and you’re inclined, they’ll use two forks to mix the crucial adornments of butter and egg into the cheese lava.
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8. Çilbir at Sook
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Los Angeles as a whole doesn’t see enough çilbir, an enduring Turkish breakfast of eggs poached to jammy yolks, covered in garlicky yogurt and then doused in chile crisp and soft herbs. Sook opens at 11 a.m., so the dish might qualify here as brunch (and pair fantastically with a late Lebanese breakfast ordered from Compass Rose). Previte incorporates za’atar into her version of chile crisp, so the creamy whoosh of savory yogurt and precisely cooked eggs meets heat with a bonus jolt of herbal-nuttiness.
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9. Golden fried chicken at Golden Mountain Chicken
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The marquee fried chicken of Arpapornnopparat’s and Yuon’s stand can be ordered as is, enveloped in ripples of rice-flour batter and hinting of the marinade’s aromatics and fish sauce. The “golden sauce” that gives the revamped concept its name is indeed gilding, but it’s calibrated for maximum effect: It’s a glaze, not too sweet, that adds its own crackle as it cools without detracting from the crust’s texture, and the flavors of ginger and black pepper ring through without dominating. I’ve tried it with sauce and without on a couple of occasions for comparisons, and my hands and face wind up sticky while the unadorned chicken is nudged to the table’s edge. Golden sauce wins.
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10. Chopped salad at Sook
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It’s easy when you’re with a group, especially since the Market allows you to order from all the vendors at once, to compile a feast of tacos and noodles and soups and dips and … somewhere in there, perhaps a round of vegetables sounds appealing. The brief menu Sook fills the void nicely. This isn’t the kind of chopped salad overloaded with cured meats and cheeses. It has a calming simplicity: fresh lettuces, cucumbers and avocado, with spiced chickpeas for garnish. Red wine vinaigrette brings the lightness, but the other option of labneh ranch has the right touch of richness.
Maydan Market: 4301 W. Jefferson Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 838-9868, maydanmarket.com
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