Mandina Kitchen joins Lygon Street's Middle Eastern culinary wave

Tap-tap-tap. Our waiter is drumming on the base of an upturned saucepan. After a final thrum, he lifts the pot for a suspenseful reveal. My table's oohs and yeahs are lifted into the air on a wave of excitement that's suddenly fragrant with layered rice and lamb.

We are exulting in the fragrant fog of maglooba, a dish that translates as "upside down" in Arabic, and we're eating it at Mandina Kitchen, a humble, earnest, alcohol-free Yemeni restaurant that opened in April 2021.

The menu describes maglooba as an "impressive tower". It's that, for sure, but the dish also finds the balance between delicate and hearty. Do as the experts do, and eat it with your hands directly from the platter or call for cutlery and share plates.

There's also the option of sitting on rugs and cushions to dine, as you might on the Arabian Peninsula.

Whether at table or mat, you can feast on flaky house-baked mulawa bread, crisp samboosa pastries, sizzling lahsa (a piquant claypot scramble of tomato and egg topped with cream cheese) and the essential mandi, a baked rice dish served either with bone-in spiced lamb or chicken, scattered with raisins, the juices of the meat infused into fluffy, glossy rice.

There's implicit generosity in a lamb broth that's served as a complimentary starter: slow-cooked and redolent of pepper, cumin, coriander, cardamom and turmeric, the spices that thread through many Yemeni dishes, it's a hand extended in welcome as much as it's an entree.

Mandina is owned by Aisha Mohammed and her husband Mohammed Alhamed. They moved to Melbourne in 2017 from Saudi Arabia but culturally they consider themselves Yemeni. (Things aren't good in Yemen, partly because of Saudi-backed military intervention, an element in a complex and crushing civil war that's led to widespread suffering, and to the exodus that has seen many Yemenis take their gifts elsewhere.)

Aisha's family has a 50-year legacy of running restaurants in Yemen, so when the pair started thinking about how to celebrate their culture in their adopted home, doing it through food seemed obvious.

Lygon Street has reflected various waves of Melbourne migration. It was a Yiddish shtetl in the 1930s, with kosher butchers and bakers at the heart of a thriving and progressive community. Through the 1950s and beyond, it became a key Italian hub.

Pizza is still stretched and spaghetti still twirled in these parts, but the southern end of Lygon Street is now characterised as much by its Muslim restaurants as its pasta. Khabbay, Ziyka and Qabail serve the Pakistani community. Leyalina and Cairo Nights celebrate the food of Egypt. There are the shisha lounges Nefes, Balcony and El Giza for water pipes and conversation.

And there's the lovely Mandina, a taste of the Arabian Peninsula for those hankering for it and a pleasant cultural incursion for those who've never given it a thought. Whatever the angle of your approach, it's easy to enjoy.

Restaurateur Ronnie Di Stasio's guide to Lygon Street, Carlton