Once a ghost kitchen, Layali Feast, a Middle Eastern restaurant, recently took a physical form inside the Coffee Beanery in downtown Bloomington. The restaurant opened its doors inside the coffee shop Dec. 3, 2025, and features a fully halal menu.
The restaurant started out in August 2025, when the food was made in the kitchen of Turkuaz Cafe and was delivery and takeout only in the evenings. The new location is open from 11:30 a.m. to 1 a.m., but only offers seating after the coffee shop closes at 5 p.m.
However, I did not know that they had a sit-down option when I arrived at about 4:30 p.m., so I was a little confused about how the ordering process worked. I was expecting a counter or sit-down service, but instead you need to order online. So, I ordered through their website and waited in the store for pick-up, which only took about 10-15 minutes.
Since I took my food home, I had to endure the wonderful smells emanating from my takeout bag on the drive home, forcing myself not to pull over and try a piece of the pita.
I ordered the lamb shawarma and the hummus appetizer. When ordering online, there was a lack of details about what comes with your dish when you order it, so here are a few details I wish I would have known. The lamb shawarma was roasted lamb with herbs and onions inside of flatbread. It came with seasoned fries and creamy white sauce. The hummus appetizer was a large container of hummus that came with about a dozen pieces of pita.
The menu also had other traditional Middle Eastern offerings like baba ghanoush and yalanji as appetizers and chicken and lamb kabsa and mandi as entrees. They also had several salads and a dessert menu including baklava and basbousa.
The lamb I ordered was tender and flavorful, but what really carried it was the sauce. When I first opened my meal, I thought it was some sort of tzatziki sauce, but that wouldn't really make sense since it wasn’t Greek food. It ended up being a warm garlic and tahini sauce that paired expertly with the lamb.
The fries compared to the rest of the meal felt like an afterthought. They were seasoned with various spices, but they were slightly soggy and not anything special. They would have been better if there was more than one container of white sauce to dip them in.
The shop’s hummus was creamy but a little underwhelming. The first bite hosted flavors of toasted chickpea, pepper, olive oil and tahini. However, as the dip went on, the complex flavors receded and left mainly the tahini flavor, which in my opinion doesn’t work well by itself. However, the portion size for this appetizer was perfect. Sometimes when you order anything that has a dip, you either run out of the dip or the vehicle, which in this case was the pita. But thankfully, there was plenty of hummus and pita to go around.
Overall, the experience was a little underwhelming, probably because I didn’t understand the business style of the restaurant going into it. Based on the food alone, it was pretty good, but I do think there could be ways to improve. First, a clearer guide to how the restaurant works on their website would do wonders, then better side dish options, and this location would be perfect.
