The space at 4812 Bryan Street has been sitting empty since Mai’s Vietnamese closed in 2022, and if you’ve driven past it lately you know the feeling of a corner that’s waiting for the right thing. Melike and Kenan Turan and their son Kaan Elagoz are the right thing. Alania Mediterranean Grill has opened in the former Mai’s space — across the street from Jimmy’s Food Store and next door to Saint Valentine — and the room that Melike designed from scratch feels like it has been there for years.
The Turan family has been in Dallas since 2012, when they moved here from Turkey. Kenan came with a background in Istanbul restaurants and hotels. In 2017 they opened Istanbul Palace in Richardson, a Turkish restaurant that built a strong local following before the pandemic took it, as it took so many others, in 2020. This time around they brought in chef Tuna Patiroglu — who also worked at Istanbul Palace — to build a menu rooted in the coastal Turkish cooking they grew up with. The name Alania is a nod to Alanya, the Mediterranean city on Turkey’s southern coast where Melike and Kaan are from.
Walk in and the room announces itself immediately. Melike handled the design personally — leather seating imported from Turkey, warm lighting, landscape photographs of Istanbul and Alanya on the walls. The photographs are not decorative. They are where the family is from and where the food is from, and the room reflects that connection without overexplaining it. There is a warmth to the space that feels earned rather than manufactured, which is the difference between a room a family built and a room a designer finished.
The kitchen divides into cold mezze, hot mezze, the ocakbaşı grill, and a stone oven running pide and pizza. The cold section opens with hummus, Ezine feta with Mediterranean olives, fire-roasted eggplant, and whipped Cyprus feta — proper mezze, the kind that slows the pace of a meal down and reminds you that the point is to be at the table, not to get through it. The Anatolian Ezme is the standout in this section: a vegetable preparation of tomatoes, peppers, and walnuts finished with pomegranate molasses that has a depth most dips don’t aspire to. The hot side runs crispy falafel and broccolini alongside rotating seasonal preparations.
The room that most people will end up talking about is the ocakbaşı — the charcoal grill station where diners sit facing the fire and watch chef Patiroglu work the skewers. Ocakbaşı is a traditional Turkish grilling style, and the experience of watching the meat cook over real charcoal while you eat your mezze is the reason Turkish restaurants built the format in the first place. The skewers run chicken, lamb, beef, shrimp, and salmon. The lamb chops and the shrimp shish are the ones worth ordering first. The Grand Feast — a spread of charcoal-grilled meats including lamb chops, chicken, beef, and shrimp shish served alongside rice and fresh salads — is the order for a table that wants to eat the whole picture.
The stone oven handles Turkish pide flatbread and Neapolitan-style pizza, which is a combination that sounds unlikely and works well in practice — the two preparations share enough DNA in their dough and heat requirements that a kitchen serious about one tends to be serious about both. The whole branzino is the fish option and the one that reflects the coastal Turkish cooking at the heart of what this kitchen does.
Alcoholic drinks and a brunch program are coming. For now, Alania is lunch and dinner, open daily 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. East Dallas needed this.
Alania Mediterranean Grill is at 4812 Bryan Street, Dallas. Open daily 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Follow @alaniadallas on Instagram.
