Halal King Kitchen: Yemeni mendi and more at a Kwik Serv on Carlson Boulevard
We're back at a gas station ordering food.
At some point this became normal. At some point, eating our way through Richmond meant standing at a window outside Halal King Kitchen, a Kwik Serv gas station at 1503 Carlson Boulevard, studying a menu for Yemeni dishes we couldn't have named six months ago, and that felt fine, that felt like just a Tuesday, that felt like exactly where we were supposed to be. The city keeps doing this. You follow the food long enough and you end up somewhere you never expected, holding tea you didn't ask for, trying to figure out if the sighar or the mendi is going to be the one.
It started at Yemen Café on San Pablo Avenue. We ate lamb stew out of a bowl that was still bubbling when it hit the table, tore apart rashoosh bread the size of a yoga mat, and thought: we need more of this. That meal didn't satisfy anything. It opened a door.
Soren Hemmila
We order. The tea arrives.
Not after a wait. Not with the food. Just you've ordered, you're standing there, and now there's tea. Warm, sweet, have some tea brother. Nobody made a thing of it. The transaction of receiving it took zero seconds.
Something is going on here that is older than customer service. It lands before you've done anything to deserve it. Disorientingly friendly.
According to KQED, the kitchen is a family operation. The head chef immigrated from Yemen to Oakland and spent years cooking at a Yemeni restaurant in San Francisco's Tenderloin before a friend who owned the Kwik Serv offered him the space. His nephew came on to run the business. They put up a big Halal King sign on the facade, and the smell of cumin and roast chicken started making people do a double-take at the gas pumps.
We took the food home. The beef Sighar traveled well. Beef strips cooked dark, gone deep into themselves. Tomatoes. Hummus underneath, doing work nobody warned you about. Better by the time it hit the table.
Then the Mendi.
Mendi is the dish. If you are going to eat Yemeni food once in your life, this is the thing you are supposed to eat. The idea is simple, and the execution is everything: chicken or lamb, slow-cooked, low heat, a long time, over rice that absorbs everything happening above it.
Two chicken quarters on a mountain of long-grain rice that is neon orange in a way that is genuinely beautiful.
The spices are not the spices you'd expect in a savory dish. There's something in there that keeps circling around pumpkin pie and never landing there, something warm and deep and specific that you cannot name and eventually stop trying to name and just eat.
The chicken fell off the bone before we asked it to. Yogurt, cooling and plain, and a tomato sauce that is basically salsa, bright, a little sharp, right on the edge of heat.
And that's the other thing. You stand here long enough, and the categories stop making sense. The tomato sauce tastes like salsa. The whole dish looks like the Pollo Asada plate from Taqueria La Bamba.
Soren Hemmila
Which may be is what American food actually is, if American food is anything. Burgers and fries, sure, pizza, fine, tacos absolutely, but also this, also mendi on a Tuesday night in a takeout container. The food is here because the people are here; the food carries that, too. It doesn't make it less delicious. It makes it mean more.
Is it Yemen Café? No. Yemen Café is a sit-down revelation, a different category entirely, the kind of meal that resets your expectations. This is a window outside a Kwik Serv on Carlson Boulevard with Hot Cheetos on the shelf and the freeway overpass doing what freeway overpasses do just up the road. But the food is serious.
Get the Mendi. Let them give you the tea.
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