Pop-ups can be a gamble. But Ilna’s California-Lebanese cuisine is a sure win

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Oftentimes, a pop-up is like a rough draft of a restaurant, an opportunity for a chef to play around with various iterations of a menu before discovering what really clicks. For a diner, the guinea pig in this experiment, it can be a bit of a gamble. But Ilna is a win. 

At the 6-month-old California-Lebanese pop-up, Maz Naba’s food is the result of an abundance of experience. Over the last two decades, he’s worked alongside some of the region’s best chefs at seminal restaurants RN74, Coi, Rich Table, Mister Jiu’s, and, most recently, Osito. Though he started his career in the kitchen, he spent the bulk of it focused on beverages and front-of-house operations. Now, the half-Lebanese chef is infusing traditional dishes with local ingredients like fresh persimmons and Dungeness crab.  

Ilna — something Naba’s been thinking about for 10 years — means “for us” in Arabic. The idea stemmed from his desire to re-create the Eastern Mediterranean dishes he grew up with. “Middle Eastern food is meant to bring everyone together,” he says, “and my vision is to create that same feel.”

Nostalgia is one thing, but skill is another, and Naba’s menu is so well executed that I’d never have guessed that it’d been many years since he stepped behind the stove himself. “It’s nerve-wracking,” he admits.

Delicate yogurt dumplings called shish barak, stuffed with dry-aged beef and drizzled with za’atar pepper crunch, reflect both his Lebanese heritage and the influences of California cuisine. Tangy labneh layered with smoked trout, luminous orbs of cured roe, and verdant dill oil is so precisely plated it looks like something you’d see on a tasting menu.

To make kishk, he ferments bulgur wheat in yogurt for a month until it dries into a powder that can be whipped into a spread. He cures his own meats. The tight, 13-item menu features four distinct types of bread — za’atar sourdough, sumac sourdough, squid-ink pita, and yogurt pita — all of which Naba bakes himself. 

Triangles of the toasted sumac sourdough pair with an autumn-squash hummus topped with hunks of oyster mushrooms and crispy shards of chicken skin. Crunchy za’atar sourdough crackers are served with fatty pieces of Liberty Duck prosciutto infused with five spice. Roasted squash filled with Dungeness crab fried rice might not look like Lebanese food at first glance, but it’s a riff on kousa mahshi, a classic stuffed zucchini dish, with earthy sweetness added by a pepita-date crisp and a peppery bite from nasturtium. 

Even the beverage list ties into Lebanese cuisine. Naba is also the owner and winemaker at Augur Wine Co. and pours some of his selections alongside those of Terra Sancta Trading Company, which imports bottles from Morocco, Lebanon, Armenia, and other countries. For cocktails, he’s working with Uzziel Pulido, who was bar director at the now-closed Liliana, on a menu of low- and zero-proof drinks that complement the flavors of Levantine cuisine.

Mission wine bar Buddy hosts the pop-up on Sunday nights, when you’ll see Naba in the kitchen dusting blush-pink pieces of kampachi with sumac furikake and twisting ruby-red sheets of cardamom black-garlic lamb bresaola into miniature rosettes.

A serial entrepreneur, Naba has big ambitions for Ilna. He’d like to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant, a place where you can sit down for a meal, with a “larder section” selling freshly baked breads and packaged spreads like hummus and labneh. “I wanna take this to the next level,” he says. 

Not every pop-up has what it takes to make the transition. But Ilna seems to be a safe bet.