Location: 2340 Council Ring Road #107, Mississauga
Website: https://www.facebook.com/Almonasabah/
I’ve been on quite a roll with Middle Eastern restaurants — so far I’ve checked out Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon, and they’ve all been seriously tasty. And now here’s Yemen to continue that streak.
Alonasabah’s menu is laser-focused — they have a handful of appetizers and desserts, but for the most part there’s only one dish on the menu. If you want something other than mandi? Go somewhere else, that’s all they’ve got here.
Mandi is a deceptively simple dish: it’s just rice and meat (with the choice between chicken and lamb). It’s topped with almonds, raisins, and fried onions.
It’s so good.
The rice is fragrant, richly spiced and deeply flavourful; it’s delicious enough that I’d happily eat a big bowl of it just on its own.
I tried both the chicken and lamb, and both types of meat were super tender and packed with flavour. They’ve obviously been cooked for a very long time at a very low temperature; the chicken was so incredibly tender that the cartilage had completely broken down, essentially turning into cartilage butter.
The rice and the meat are both super tasty, but it’s the toppings that help put this dish over the top. The almonds add some nuttiness and crunch, and even the raisins work surprisingly well. I’m generally not a fan of raisins in any context, so I was shocked by how much I enjoyed them here. Unlike qabuli palau, the somewhat similar dish I tried from Afghanistan, the raisins go really well with everything else. They add subtle pops of sweetness that compliment the dish perfectly and never overwhelm.
As for the onions, they were dark and intense, with a flavour somewhere between caramelized and fried. They were sweet, but with an edge — almost bordering on burnt but never crossing that line.
It seems kind of odd at first that this place only really serves the one dish, but if you do something this well? Why the hell should you waste your time doing anything else?
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