Mandi House, a Yemeni restaurant known for slow-roasted meats, is preparing to open in Roseville, with the team aiming for a mid-December opening, before Christmas. The date isn’t confirmed. Owner and founder Faris Alqabass told What Now Sacramento the team still has several city and county approvals to complete.
The restaurant is taking over 963 Pleasant Grove Blvd., the former Flame & Fire Brazilian Steakhouse. It will be the brand’s first Northern California location outside the Bay Area. Its newest location, in San Francisco’s Mission District, opened this summer, and the first Mandi House started in Westwood, Los Angeles.
The new location will have something the other Mandi Houses don’t: a halal, nonalcoholic bar, which the team confirmed. It may also add charcoal-grilled meats for the first time, though that isn’t final. “The main thing that we are adding in this location is a new halal bar, nonalcoholic bar,” Alqabass said.
The menu centers on mandi, a Yemeni cooking style that begins with a hole in the ground. “We specialize in slow roasted meats, which would be the mandi,” he said. “Mandi stands for a cooking method that originated in Yemen, where we dig a hole in the ground, and then we add the charcoal, and we add some wood. It’s more like a convection oven in the ground.” The meat goes in once the hole is extremely hot and is closed up for about four to six hours, cooked by the heat alone with minimal seasoning, “so the flavor of the meat is really what shines here.”
Restaurants in the U.S. don’t cook it exactly that way, he said, but the flavor is the same. Lamb is the main meat, selected from a farm the team works with at a certain age so it comes out tender, and the spices are imported from Yemen.
Other dishes are cooked in hardah, a volcanic stone vessel heated in an oven to more than 550 degrees, with food served scorching hot. A signature dish is fahsa, which he compared to pulled pork but made with lamb, in a stew-like sauce. It is eaten with mulah, a traditional Yemeni bread made in house, with dough kneaded in the restaurant and cooked to order.
Faris Alqabass came to the United States more than 20 years ago and started in New York, working his way up from a deli cashier and salesperson to owning several delis, and now has more than a dozen food and beverage brands, according to the restaurant’s manager. He opened his first restaurant, a Yemeni spot, in New York in 2019. He said he saw few authentic Yemeni options when he came to California, where he eats only halal. “I saw so many other options, especially Persian, but not Yemeni and not really authentic food,” he said. “So the idea came to my head and I said, why not? Let me expand or carry my business that I opened in New York to California.”
The team is planning a grand opening event with prizes and free meals for a selected audience, not everyone who shows up. “Stay tuned. Something really delicious is cooking, and we would very much love their love and support,” Alqabass told What Now Sacramento. “We would love to invite them to try how authentic Yemeni food should taste like.”
