Leila is the 2020 Detroit Free Press Restaurant of the Year
SOURCE: DETROIT FREE PRESS
BY: MARK KURLYANDCHIK
It is the dream of every parent to leave a legacy for their children.
But in the hardscrabble business of feeding people, birthright often morphs into burden along the way.
The kids who grew up taking carryout orders while doing homework assignments from behind the host stand know too well the sheer amount of human will and personal sacrifice it takes to run a restaurant.
It’s one reason so many longtime Chinese carryout spots are closing up in metro Detroit and elsewhere around the country; the kids know better than to go into the family business.
The restaurant industry has only grown more challenging in recent years, as costs increased, technology evolved, dining habits changed and the act of cooking food for others rose in cultural status, in effect drawing much-needed attention and scrutiny to an industry long out of balance.
But who better to adapt to the new order than the rare someone reared in the business who chooses to persevere despite everything? Someone who’s learned from both the successes and failures of the previous generation, who’s seen all of the industry’s challenges and heartbreaks up close but still has the courage to say, “bring it on.”
Though few and far between, this new crop of second-generation restaurateurs and chefs — often the children of immigrants — are taking all they’ve learned from their parents and writing their own uniquely American stories onto a palimpsest of family tradition and culture, updated to fit modern tastes and trends.
That’s precisely the story of Samy Eid, whose father, Sameer, is among Michigan’s longest-serving Lebanese restaurateurs — a forerunner of Middle Eastern food in metro Detroit for almost 50 years.
The long-gone Sheik restaurant is often credited for introducing Lebanese food to Detroiters in 1936, but Sameer Eid made quite a name for himself and his Phoenicia restaurant after buying a rundown Highland Park diner in 1971 on a whim for $5700.
The Sheik closed more than 30 years ago, while Phoenicia continues to pack ‘em in for big spreads of hummus and smoky baba ganoush, the best tabbouleh in town and those famously crispy baby back ribs, served out of a swanky white tablecloth joint on the outskirts of downtown Birmingham, where the restaurant’s been since relocating in the early ‘80s. (Phoenicia was our first-ever selection as Free Press/ Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Restaurant of the Year Classic two years ago.)
“You have to understand, if you’re a married person, your wife is the restaurant and you have a mistress at home,” Sameer told me when I first asked him the secret to his success a few years back.
The sprightly 80-year-old still takes regular pre-dawn trips down to the Detroit Produce Terminal to choose ingredients for his restaurant, but it’s his son who has run the day-to-day business at Phoenicia for the last 16 years, as well as the contemporary Mediterranean restaurant Forest since 2015.
And with the recent opening of the family’s third restaurant, Samy has taken the biggest step yet out of his father’s shadow — by honoring Sameer’s so-called mistress, his wife Leila.
“My dad started Phoenicia almost 50 years ago,” Samy, 39, said. “And he’s been successful, very blessed, very lucky. But the one thing that has kind of been a constant light and a guiding (force) throughout has been my mom. … She was the glue that kind of held it all together. What better way to pay homage to what’s made us successful?”
Inspired by his mother’s casual Sunday feasts, Samy opened Leila on Detroit’s Capitol Park at the end of October as a love letter to the Eid matriarch and her warm Lebanese hospitality.
Named for his mom while evoking her easy elegance and Old World charm, Leila sits at the crossroads of two of America’s most exciting dining trends: second-generation restaurateurs coming into their own and diners’ growing enchantment with Middle Eastern cuisine.
It’s been a little strange to watch national media heap praise and accolades on Middle Eastern restaurants in places like Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Oakland, Calif., when we know that metro Detroit — from Dearborn to Sterling Heights and beyond — is the real American mecca of Arab cuisine. Sure, stalwarts alongside Phoenicia like Al Ameer and Shatila have received their share of attention in recent years, but they’re always positioned as antique artifacts, not exactly hallmarks of modern dining.
Enter: Leila, which confidently stepped into the latter role upon opening, quickly becoming Detroit’s pinnacle of modern Lebanese cuisine in one of the city’s most visible historic quarters. Leila serves best-in-class versions of food that’s both familiar to and emblematic of the region, while exuding a grace and elegance that defies a large, high-volume restaurant.
This is why Leila is the 2020 Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Restaurant of the Year.
The soul of Lebanese dining
Lebanese hospitality is marked by generosity and overflowing abundance, perhaps best exemplified by the mezze that makes up so much of the typical meal — a series of small dishes filling the table with as many plates as it can hold. Shuffling them to make room is a necessary part of the pageantry of any given meal, which can stretch across hours, especially when aided by perspiring glasses of cloudy arak, the potent anise-flavored Lebanese spirit commonly consumed with mezze.
That’s the conceit at Leila, too, with half its menu made up of cold and hot mezze, simple dishes made of just a few ingredients designed to be shared among the table.
At Phoenicia, the hummus has always been overshadowed by the superior baba ganoush, but at Leila I can’t not order a creamy bowl of the well-seasoned cloud of chickpea spread. There are no cutting-edge embellishments here, just a quality version of a traditional dish, arriving at the table with its central crater full of whole chickpeas in a pool of high quality Lebanese olive oil.
Cold mezze choices also include a verdant tabbouleh, bright from ample lemon juice, and a kibbeh niyee made from ground American lamb leg sparked with a pinch of cayenne and baharat, the Lebanese seven spice blend of coriander, allspice, nutmeg and more. You’d think a dish this simple — ground raw lamb with cracked wheat and spices — would taste roughly the same no matter where you have it, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. There are as many different ways to prepare kibbeh niyee as there are cedar trees in Lebanon. Leila’s employs less bulgur than what you’ll typically find around town, offering a lighter mouthfeel that lets the fresh meat and its seasonings shine. For as much as I’ve eaten Leila’s kibbeh niyee, I’ve built up little immunity to its charms. I can’t help but order it every time.
Leila’s fattoush is another requisite order, done in the style of the real Leila’s salads at home. Its lettuce, radish, tomato, cucumber, onion and fried pita chips are all diced finely — akin to a fattoush chop salad — and covered in earthy, herbaceous za’atar and garlic, lemon juice, and olive oil. Leila also goes heavy on the pomegranate molasses, a slightly floral juice that’s been reduced with sugar to a syrupy consistency. It’s red fruit notes tend to have the final say.
And though Samy is quick to point out that Leila is not intended to be Phoenicia — and that getting out of its shadow is daunting — he couldn’t not include the older restaurant’s famous baby back ribs, another untraditional dish for a Lebanese restaurant.
When Sameer immigrated to the U.S. in 1961, he first landed in northern Texas and then Oklahoma City, where his cousin was an AM radio disc jockey. During his brief stint in the American south, Sameer fell in love with barbecue. Decades later, unhappy with the barbecue scene in metro Detroit, he decided to cook his own baby back ribs for his wife and kids at Phoenicia. When a regular spotted them eating them in the dining room, he asked for them, too, and today they remain the most popular item on the Birmingham restaurant’s menu.
They’re faithfully recreated at Leila, beginning with ultra-lean baby back ribs from the small side of the rack. They’re first broiled, then cooled, brined in a white vinegar-based sauce turned red from house spices, and then broiled again and finished with a generous dusting of those spices. The result is a chewy rib with ample crispness and a smoky, subtly spicy bite from the rub. (For an even more amplified textural experience with maximum crunch, order them “Samy-style”.)
The ribs are part of the entree selection, but I like to order them alongside more traditional hot mezze like the plump Lebanese sausages called makanek, little fat thumbs of coriander-spiced ground lamb meat doused in pomegranate molasses, or shish barak, toothy fried dumplings stuffed with ground lamb and pine nuts and served in a tangy warm yogurt sauce. (Typically a home-style dish, you’ll rarely find shish barak in any Lebanese restaurant.)
Despite a 49-year history of serving Middle Eastern food, this is the first Eid family restaurant with a bread oven — and it is a game changer. Leila is not a chef-driven restaurant, but there is a James Beard Award semifinalist chef overseeing its kitchen. Nick Janutol, who until recently was the executive chef at sister restaurant Forest, now runs all the family’s restaurant kitchens. Janutol spent three months developing the recipe for the pita bread served at Leila, made of yeasted dough that puffs to form a spongy pocket after two to three minutes in the gas-powered Mugnaini oven. Every meal begins with a basket of the still steaming bread, translating to some 700 individual pitas on a busy Saturday night.
The entire menu is available all day, but Leila also offers some smaller salad and sandwich options during weekday lunch. The newly introduced lamb pocket is one not to miss. A crescent half of pita is stuffed with fluffy yellow turmeric rice and a generous heap of falling apart braised lamb shoulder. A slathering of lemony lentil mjaddara and mild Aleppo pepper paste cut through the richness. You won’t find a sandwich like it in Lebanon or anywhere else — it is purely a Nick Janutol creation that hits every note you want out of a savory sandwich.
The Aleppo paste appears again, though more subtly, in the fantastic shish kebab. Hand-cut cubes of ribeye steak marinate in the imported pepper paste with tomato and garlic for 24 hours and then grilled over charcoal until medium rare. They’re dressed with more of the pepper paste then wrapped like a present in the thin, crepe-like Levantine bread called markouk. When it comes to Lebanese kebab, I’ve been a Dearborn Meat Market loyalist for years. And though it’s certainly pricier at Leila, I don’t think I’ve encountered a better kebab anywhere — brilliant from the red pepper and tomato but underpinned by a fine layer of smoke. The shish tawook, marinated in yogurt and garlicy toum with turmeric for almost two days before cooking, is nearly just as good.
To me, one of the marks of a great restaurant is how often I’m drawn back to it. I’ve eaten at Leila more times than is typical for a restaurant review.
I’m drawn back by a lot, but lately, Leila’s bolognese is what’s got me on my knees.
“Being raised by immigrants in a Lebanese household, we didn’t have traditional Thanksgiving dinners,” Samy said. “I always felt — looking back at it, it’s silly — but I almost kind of felt this disconnect from the kids I was with at school.”
It’s a well-worn story for children of immigrants, whose hyphenated identities leave them balancing between two worlds. Leila recalled how when the Eid children were younger, they’d come home from play dates begging her to make them something — anything! — a little more American, like the “normal” stuff their friends were eating.
So one day she whipped up a Lebanese take on spaghetti bolognese, substituting lamb for ground beef and showering the plate with pine nuts to make it feel a little more true to the family.
That’s the same way it’s served at the restaurant today. And even in the restaurant, Leila’s bolognese works its way into your soul like a mother’s love — one of those things you know you’d miss it if you grew up with it and moved away.
A little sweet and deep and satisfying to slurp, the bolognese is far from traditional Lebanese but wholly embodies the Leila spirit.
“Everything you do with love is beautiful,” Leila told me recently.
That may as well be the restaurant’s tagline, too.
