Al Wadee Restaurant and Bakery

🇱🇧 LEBANON / With the Southland's largest variety of manakeesh, this bakery also serves a wide range of favorites from the Levant.

🇱🇧 LEBANON
📍 311 S. Brookhurst Street,
Little Arabia, Anaheim
🅿️ Ample parking in plaza
🥤 No Alcohol

📸 All photos by Jared Cohee
for Eat the World Los Angeles

When you walk into this modest Little Arabia restaurant, it is hard not to be immediately mesmerized by the colorful blocks that make up the menu. The biggest and most central of these blocks focuses on manakeesh, which they translate to English as Lebanese pizza. Each order is made fresh and tossed in the oven, making it essential to center at least one of these on your table during any meal.

Al Wadee also respects their meats, whether off the grill or prepared in other ways, so do not hesitate to order a big platter and surround everything with their colorful, fresh mezza. In the photo below you can find very strong versions of tabouli ($11), foule ($12), and hummus ($10), alongside the yogurt, pita, and pickles served with the platters.

The tabouli and hummus speak for themselves in the photo, but the foule is particularly well-made. Often eaten for breakfast, this is especially delicious right when they open for lunch, its pureed and whole fava beans combined with an enormous amount of garlic and spiked with tart lemon.

They do not seem to be making falafel any longer, so the mezza are the only choices for your vegetarian friends besides the za’atar manakeesh ($5, below). This makes a good baseline order for any table though, because the tasty herb lets you enjoy the real delight of their breads.

Meat lovers will love the lahmbajin ($7, above), a type of manakeesh that literally translates from Arabic as meat with dough. Ground beef is combined with minced tomatoes, garlic, onions, parsley, and what seems like an entire cabinet of herbs and spices.

On the menu the restaurant calls three options “sphiha,” which is closely related to manakeesh, but these seem to be made in the exact same way here. The sphiha shamia ($8, below) is a meat and yogurt blend that takes on the look and feel of pâté. Honestly it would probably be hard to dislike even one of the many options in this section of the menu just because their bread is so good and the kitchen is so talented.

If you start a conversation with one of the women who run the place and do the cooking, besides the manakeesh they will recommend their grilled meat platters called mashawi. These are also good ways to get a good variety of bites on your table, as they come with salad, hummus, rice, pickles, and toum. The mashawi combo plate ($27, above) has portions of chicken tawouk, beef, and kafta, each adding its own unique flavors.

Even that simple salad is somehow precious, its crisp bites making lovely interludes to more meaty and fatty flavors. Of the three meats, the chicken might take the gold medal, its marinade and the attention of the chef’s kiss on the grill is basically perfection.

Not on the menu but fairly prominent in the restaurant’s photos online is mansaf ($35, above), yogurt-braised lamb served over rice. While this was enjoyable, it probably will not be the focus of future visits just for the simple fact that it is done better in other locations up and down the street. Mansaf is usually a once a week or weekend special, and not available daily. Because it is here, it somehow does not seem to have the same love attached to it that the manakeesh and mashawi do.

One very unique offering also not on the menu is a platter of grape leaves and zucchini ($35, below), which is served with large hunks of lamb. The very thin grape leaves and zucchini are both stuffed with ground lamb and rice, and the whole plate seems to be bathing in the drippings of the meat.