Familiar Wichita chef is opening his newest local restaurant on west side next week
A new Wichita restaurant by a familiar Wichita chef, which I first told you about in January, is ready to open.
Youssef Youssef, the Lebanon-born chef who founded well-known Wichita restaurants like Le Monde, Marbella and Mediterranean Grill, says he’ll open the doors to his new Sesame Mediterranean Kitchen on Monday. The new restaurant is in the former Pie Five space at 2755 N. Maize Road.
It’ll be a soft opening, he said, meant as a way for his new employees to get their jobs down. Like many other local restaurateurs, Youssef said he’s having trouble finding people to hire, so he won’t be as fully staffed as he’d like.
But he’s ready to debut his new menu, which you can see below. It includes soups, salads, wraps, sandwiches and items from the grill like kebabs, sesame crusted tilapia and herb-crusted salmon. It also has a few pasta dishes, including a four-cheese gnocchi.
Among the other specialties on the menu will be Youssef’s famous fattoush salad, which he tops with pickles, olives and feta cheese, as well as spanakopita, olive bread and a Mediterranean chicken pizza.
The restaurant’s hours starting Monday will be 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays.
Youseef has been back and forth between Wichita and Beirut since first moving here in 1988, and Beirut is where he’d been since returning there in 2007 to raise his young children. While there, he owned a chain of bakeries called Khabbaz Bakery. But the economy took a turn for the worse, and he returned to Wichita late last summer.
He describes Sesame as a casual Mediterranean eatery where customers will order at the counter and wait for their food to be delivered to their tables.
Youssef first moved to Wichita in 1988 to study electrical engineering at Wichita State University. He financed his studies with a job at Cafe Chantilly, one of Latour founder Antoine Toubia’s first restaurants.
He discovered a passion for the restaurant business, and in 1994, he turned a former NuWay Cafe into Le Monde, a restaurant that endures today. He sold that two years later and turned a former Popeye’s building at 335 S. Armour (now Towne East Mall Drive) into Marbella Cafe. In 1999, he sold his interest in that restaurant and went on to open several other Wichita restaurants, including Mediterranean Cafes on east Kellogg, on Tyler Road and in Bel Aire, as well as Kababji at 21st and Webb.
In 2002, he decided he wanted his three three American-born children to get a taste of life in his native Beirut. They moved back for four years, and Youssef ran a bakery specializing in inexpensive sandwiches and pizza. That bakery was destroyed in a bombing, and when civil war broke out in 2006, the family returned to Wichita. That’s when Youssef decided to open a new restaurant called Mediterranean Grill in the old Marbella spot.
But a year later, he decided again to return to Lebanon and left Mediterranean Grill to co-owner Mustafa Sawli. That restaurant is still open.
Sesame Mediterranean Kitchen menu
This story was originally published April 15, 2021 at 1:08 PM.
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