Bryan Yealy, corporate chef
Washington, DC

Category: fine dining

Capital Restaurant Group opened Neyla in Georgetown six years ago, followed by spinoffs in Detroit and at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The latter two locations have closed, but corporate chef Bryan Yealy continues to believe that Neyla is "a brilliant restaurant concept" with room to grow.

View Neyla's menu

Concept: The whole reason behind Neyla was to bring Lebanese/Mediterranean food to the masses in the most traditional way that we could at a moderate price point. Our customers include a lot of news people who go abroad, like people from CNN, and they come over and say, "We had this in Lebanon and hadn't found anything that tasted like it until we came here."

Menu hits: If you want to be blown away at Neyla, you have the grand mezza. You could almost call it an appetizer buffet. The first time they bring it to your table, everybody is amazed. A nice-size four top is covered with food. You need at least four people. Most of those who order it know what they're coming for.

We have a charcoal pit in the dining room and that's what we cook over. And we have an open-hearth oven that we bake all the pita in. We usually run a mixed grill. The skewers sit in a holder over the top of the pit, and the chefs turn them by hand. Then we take all those meats, pull them off the skewer and serve them on lavash with garlic whip, a very pungent emulsion of garlic and oil and citric acid, served with sumac onions (shaved bermuda onion, torn parsley, za'atar and sumac).

Menu misses: We used to have a traditional Lebanese dish called "bird's head." It was really no more than roasted beef tenderloin, like a beef brochette, but nobody would order it. They wouldn't even ask what it was.

Making it work: My staff makes it non-intimidating. The servers are so educated in the product. They know when a table doesn't have a lot of knowledge, and they will come to the table to help.

One great idea: We serve a gift from our chef to every table, labneh, manous and marinated olives. They explain that the labneh is a fresh yogurt cheese and the manous is pita roasted with za'atar and Lebanese olive oil. After that, they take the guest on a tour of the menu and basically explain it to them.

What customers remember: The oven is a focal point of the restaurant. It's burning all day, and I think it's one of the sexy parts of the restaurant. Diners get fresh-baked pita right out of the oven.

Signature beverage: You'd be surprised how many people come in for arack. Arack complements a lot of Lebanese food. Like kibbe, a raw meat dish that's basically like tartare. Traditionally you're not supposed to eat it without arack. We also have a lot of Lebanese wines—more than I knew existed. Being that we're in Georgetown, we sell a lot of cordials, but we have a lot of luck with the arack.

Biggest challenge: We had to walk gingerly in the year after 9/11, but people really embraced us more than we thought they would. As much as want to tie ourselves to Lebanon, our name says "Neyla, a Mediterranean Grill."

I think Neyla is a metropolitan concept. I don't think we could ever go to the suburbs. I don't think it would be embraced because of the lack of knowledge of the food. We want to open others, but we want to call this one a slam-dunk before we move ahead. What hurt us in Las Vegas was overhead. We were fighting all the time with the big-name places that were open 24 hours, and we were just doing one meal period a day.