Bill Addison discusses the live fire fests at Maydan LA in West Adams

Those entering the West Adams complex, which Rose Previte spent six years creating, for the first time can expect some confusion when their destination is Maydan. Are you going to the dining room or to the restaurant?

Maydan Market calls Previte their entire incredible 10,000 square foot project in a former factory for the niche specialty coin collecting sites. Beneath the exposed wood and steel beams, seven dining options now circle a central fireplace clad in bronze.

The decor is casual at six of the vendors, which serve dishes that include regional Mexican, Thai and Californian dishes. Sit at a tiled table, tap the QR code and scroll through the menu pages. In just a few minutes, the team behind Holy Basil can have you twirling a fork around pad Thai and then grabbing a huge, crunchy slice of LA's most famous tlayuda with both hands.

Maydan LA, on the other hand, is the market's only full-service restaurant and is located in the back of the space. It is divided by a long, tiled bar along the left wall, located behind the fireplace and the oval bar that surrounds it, and aesthetically framed by double Moroccan doors painted in hypnotic geometries. A mural depicting a vineyard winds its way over light brick and around two picture windows.

These are visual references to the cultures Previte shapes as a chef, experienced traveler and restaurateur. Their talent for combining dishes from a broad spectrum of the world map into a cohesive narrative is the restaurant's greatest strength, as well as its guide to possibilities yet to be realized. More on that in a moment.

“Maydan” is Previte’s shibboleth. It is the name of the career-defining restaurant she opened in Washington, D.C. in 2017 and her cookbook, published by Abrams in 2023. The term also feels like their culinary GPS coordinates. “Pronounced 'MY-dahn', 'MAY-dahn' or 'MI-dan', the word is used throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, Central and South Asia, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and North Africa,” she writes in her book: “It means the same thing everywhere: a central public meeting place, often in the middle of a city. A space where people come together as a community to celebrate, to mourn, to rebel.”

Put a pin on Beirut as a starting point. Previte's mother has Lebanese roots, and Maydan anchors us there while also incorporating other types of food she has learned through her hiking and research. Before the original D.C. location began serving customers, she and her founding co-chefs Chris Morgan and Gerald Addison traveled to Morocco, Tunisia, Georgia, Lebanon and Turkey, often learning from home cooks and realizing that fire cooking was a unifying factor. These influences, fueled by roaring fire pits, continue to shape Maydan's direction.

My best advice? Come with a group.

Waiters guide guests to a family-style prix fixe for $95 per person marked “tawleh” (“table” in Arabic). The spread includes hummus and other dips; a round of mouneh (pickled or preserved vegetables) and salad greens; a few small plates and, the one big decision, a sharing plate where you can choose between meat or fish or a head of seasoned roasted cauliflower.

If you're the type of person who balks at being sold a package deal – me too – almost everything included in the tawleh and more is available à la carte. But over several meals, I came to appreciate the combination of this option. Previte understands how to package a selection of dishes to create the most consistent, nutritious experience possible, satisfying in both its unity and variety.

The mezze comes with lots of soft flatbread that is baked in a clay oven. Stir it through hummus with a balanced blend of tahini and lemon, mulchy muhammara with pomegranate molasses, and casik, the Turkish take on the region's ubiquitous herbal yogurt and cucumber dip. Alternating bites of pickled twists with mint sprigs and luscious honey-soaked dates.

The first of the small plates that always disappears: halloumi, burnished copper in the fire and topped with peanut-sesame dukkah that crunches audibly on the squeaky cheese.

Among the main courses, I love the Sayyadiah, a take on a Lebanese and Palestinian coastal dish of seasoned fish and rice. Branzino, grilled to a crisp, slathered with shatta, a chunky hot sauce (this one is milder than most) and scented with orange, cumin and lemony sumac. Add tahini as a side, a traditional combination, for another layer of flavor and texture.

Or you might want to dig into a smoky lamb shoulder, rub it with spices (Lebanese seven-spice) and bring it to a consistency that's wonderfully somewhere between melty and chewy. The meat pairs well with whatever spices you can add to it—harissa, chermoula with a fleeting hint of saffron, tahini, even toum, the garlic emulsion classically intended for poultry—as you pass through the final swirls of dip and spread the last shards of bread.

If you prefer to order wine, you can easily drink it by the glass, but the carefully annotated bottle list covers far more enticing territory. Previte's ventures include a wine import business, and she mirrors the food by introducing lesser-known varietals from Lebanon and Georgia.

Bruce Childress, director of restaurants at Maydan Market, will be stopping by with friendly suggestions for all price ranges and taste preferences. Childress brings a consummate sense of hospitality to the restaurant, as does beverage director Danny Rubenstein, whose generous presence many of us remember at Here's Looking at You.

As I revisited Maydan LA's la carte menu, I was able to take a closer look at a few little things: the Omani-style shrimp, prepared floury and without the promised spice of dried lime; a strange pumpkin mixture where all flavor seems to have been lost by the goat cheese sauce.

However, I feel a greater pull to think about the restaurant's wider potential. The menu, which has become part of the city's food culture at this moment, seems familiar. Friendly. Secure.

When I reviewed Maydan in DC during my years as Eater's national critic, I had a special dish called Tehan: ground goat meat, derived from the street food that Previte and her team shared in the Marrakesh medina, that combined heart, liver, and other sliced ​​meats, simmered harmoniously, and flavored with harissa and preserved lemon. Intense, complicated and also simple, it was one of the most wondrous things I've eaten during that time. It was a bridge. It was tasty somewhere.

This is not about the fetishization of offal. This is about the leap toward specificity, about delving beneath the surface of the most universally appealing and easiest-to-synthesize dishes—the dishes from a country's cuisine that rarely find their way into the restaurant repertoire.

Los Angeles has the Eastern Mediterranean bases covered (and no one needs to beat Bavel or Saffy's for ultra-smooth hummus) and far too few examples of excellent North African cuisine. Maydan could be a place to fill in the gaps, to make the cultures that are too often dehumanized in the United States more tangible and to pull us out of our digital fog.

Given her background and the recipes in her cookbook, as well as Maydan DC's early direction, Previte understands this. Raised by a Lebanese cook, she knows the good dash of hindbe, a winter dish made from bitter leafy vegetables with lemon and caramelized onions. She knows Loubieh bil zeit, a dish made from flat Romano beans slowly cooked in olive oil, often with whole garlic cloves and sometimes with cinnamon. You sigh with summer joy. Romano beans do not thrive everywhere. They do that in Lebanon and California.

Previte has a lot to do. She's still opening stores in the DC Maydan Market, all in all it's a triumph. When she's ready for her next adventure, I hope she finds out what could bring her restaurant even more to Los Angeles that we don't have yet. I hope she chooses to go deeper rather than further.