The shopping plaza on South Greenville Avenue in Richardson doesn’t look like much from the street. You’re looking for unit 210, past Sara’s Market, past BigDash Ice Cream, through a corridor of Middle Eastern businesses that the rest of Dallas mostly doesn’t know is there. Then you walk into Yemandi, and the smell of incense and slow-cooked lamb hits you, and you realize you’ve been missing something.
Yemandi opened in April 2025 as what it calls the first authentic Yemeni restaurant in DFW. A month later, a TikTok video racked up nearly six million views, and the dining room filled up with people who’d never eaten Yemeni food before and left converted. The restaurant is now the top-rated Yemeni spot on Yelp in the entire metroplex. None of that has made it feel like a scene. It still feels like someone’s home.
The first thing you choose when you arrive is how you want to sit. There are standard tables, but the room is also lined with a handful of secluded majlis-style booths — low, carpeted platforms with floor cushions, separated by curtains, designed for the traditional Yemeni way of sharing a meal. The staff lays out a plastic sufra on the carpet before service, the food comes on large communal plates, and the expectation is that you’re going to be here a while. People arrive for what they think will be a quick lunch and leave two hours later. The portions are designed for a table, not a person.
The anchor of the menu is mandi, a dish that sounds simple and isn’t. Lamb or chicken is slow-cooked in a sealed underground oven with saffron and a spice blend called hawajj — cumin, cardamom, turmeric, black pepper — until the meat is fall-apart tender, then served over fragrant basmati rice that has been cooking in the same broth. The Lamb Mandi and the Lamb Haneeth — slow-roasted shank, sealed to lock in moisture, seasoned with Yemeni haneeth spices — are the two to know. Both are available for dinner and on weekends.
The Beef Kabsa is slow-cooked beef layered over spiced rice with cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves running through every bite. The Lamb Zorbian adds potatoes and raisins into the rice and tilts the whole thing toward sweet and savory at once.
The bread deserves its own sentence. Rashoosh is a large, layered flatbread baked in a 500°C tandoor clay oven — somewhere between naan and a croissant in texture, substantial enough to use as a utensil for everything else on the table. Get it with the hummus or the baba ghanoush while you wait for the main plates to arrive.
The surprise on the menu is the fasoulia nashif — charred white beans. They’re seasoned with garlic, tomatoes, and parsley, dry-mashed and left to cook in the pan until the bottom scorches, then flipped to char the other side. The result is smoky and savory and difficult to stop eating. It’s a side dish that keeps pulling the spoon back. Order it.
The Chicken Mandi arrives tinted deep reddish-orange from saffron, on a bed of rice dotted with golden raisins. The lahm soghar is diced beef sautéed with onions, tomatoes, and spices until slightly crispy at the edges. The fahsa — shredded lamb in a rich spiced broth, bubbling hot in a stone pot, topped with frothy fenugreek — is the one to order if you want something that tastes like it came from someone’s grandmother’s kitchen in Sana’a.
Save room for the Royal Masoub. Yemeni banana pudding is the inadequate American description — it’s warm, layered mashed banana and shredded bread, served bubbling with cream, pistachios, dates, and honey. Order the royal size. It’s meant for two and you’ll eat the whole thing anyway. Close with a cup of Adeni tea, which is black tea brewed with fresh milk and cardamom and cinnamon, smooth and lightly sweet and the right end to a meal like this.
The service is genuinely warm and the staff knows the menu well enough to steer you. The restaurant is halal throughout. Weekend specials include dishes not available during the week — worth calling ahead if you’re making the drive specifically for the lamb bursa or the weekend zorbian.
Yemandi is open daily from 11am to 10pm, 11pm on Fridays and Saturdays. The address is 888 S. Greenville Avenue, Unit 210, Richardson, TX 75081. Phone is (214) 377-7999. The website is yemandi.com.
Go hungry, bring people, plan to stay longer than you intended.
