Sofia Levin reviews: Leyalina Egyptian Restaurant — ‘there’s something for everyone’

In a sentence: Traditional Egyptian in the heart of Melbourne’s Little Italy
The damage: mezze $9-$16, mains $14-36, desserts $10-$12
Top tip: order from the “Egyptian Delicacies” section & stick around for shisha
Quench your thirst: blended ice fruit drinks, tea, 10 basic wines & Egyptian beer
If you like this try: Mizraim (Camberwell), Kazbah Egyptian Falafel (Kensington), Cairo Nights (Carlton)

Some people call Melbourne a melting pot, but I prefer to think of it a buffet. Across the city our diverse cultural make up feeds into the cuisines and celebrations we can access. This week is a hat-trick of heritage, with Easter, Passover and Ramadan occurring simultaneously.

Tonight I’ll celebrate Passover with my family, this weekend I’ll host Easter lunch, and earlier in the week I went hunting for restaurants offering Iftar, the daily sunset meal that breaks the Ramadan fast. I found more than 20 without looking too hard (which I shared on Instagram highlights), and visited one nearby for this week’s review.

Enter Leyalina, an Egyptian restaurant that opened on Lygon Street some seven years back. Within crawling distance of the ornate lanterns and shisha pipes, pizza chefs stretch pizza bases in restaurant windows and punters line up for gelato. As Leyalina’s owner, Nader, points out, the city end of Lygon Street has changed over the years. It’s far more diverse now, thanks to various waves of migration and the Asian student population that lives and studies locally.

Nader used to be a programmer before he opened Leyalina, which means, “the night is ours”, with his wife, a former engineer who now leads the kitchen. Iftar sets here are $40 per head and include dates and samboussek to start, followed by a soup, main and dessert. I got excited by dishes that weren’t part of the package and went rogue, ordering enough for lunch the next day due to sheer excitement.

Nader – bless him – stopped me at one point to let me know I had ordered enough. When I told him I was happy with leftovers, he quickly replied, “I said it’s enough, not too much!” He’s a bottomless pit of quippy jokes and has a lovely, calm energy. The young staff, new to the job, are quick to think on their feet, too.

From the mezze section there are dips and falafel, though I’d urge you to try something different. Perhaps hawawshi aries, lamb and onion minced until it’s paste-like and baked in pita. It’s a fantastic texture, like a thin-burger patty that melds with the bread. It’s so sweet and moist that my brain tricked me into thinking there was melted cheese in it.

We also ordered more traditional dishes, such as squat moumbar sausages stuffed with spiced rice and herbs. Molokheya is arguably Egypt’s national dish, a green soup made from finely chopped jute leaves with lots of garlic. It reminds me of spinach soup but has the viscous texture of okra. This one is served with white rice and grilled chicken thighs and feels well rounded and nutritious.

Leyalina is known for its tagines, and you shouldn’t leave without ordering at least one. For us, it was the moza dunney, lamb shank baked with freekeh that soaks up the fat and juices from the tender meat. The flavours are unreal; we scraped the tagine clean. It comes with a yoghurt dip mixed through with cucumber and mint.

Other classic Egyptian dishes on offer here include koshari, a carb-loader’s dream of lentils, rice, macaroni, chickpeas, fried onion and thick tomato and garlic sauce that’s common across street stalls in Cairo. There’s also foul medammas, fava beans slow-cooked in a traditional, bulbous pot with cumin, lemon, olive oil and tahini. It landed on the table with two kinds of flatbread, fresh and crisped, as well as pickles.

There are also opportunities to try offal dishes here, whether Alexandrian beef liver cooked with spices and green chilli to start, or kawarah fattah, slow-cooked buffalo trotters on white rice and fried bread that’s doused in garlic sauce.

If you prefer to keep it simple, there’s an ample grill section with kofta, lamb and chicken, but you can also pre-order hamam mahshy, squab stuffed with freekeh and pan-fried (allow two hours).

We couldn’t manage dessert, but I was eying off roz bel laban, Egyptian rice pudding, as well as the Om Ali, essentially Egypt’s take on a bread pudding made with puff pastry, crushed nuts, milk and cream, all cooked in a tagine.

There’s something for everyone at Leyalina, whether you want to eat adventurously, stick to the grill section and dips, or have a fussy little one with you (there are half a dozen dishes on a kid’s menu, too).

Leyalina Egyptian Restaurant
191 Lygon Street, Carlton
leyalina.com.au