Michael Mina Explores His Egyptian Roots With Santa Monica's Orla

“To me, Egypt is kind of a mystery when it comes to food,” says chef Michael Mina. “Like all cuisines, there's a ton of crossover, but with Egypt, I think there's more than a lot of other countries because of how many times it was invaded.”

Born in Cairo, Egypt, Mina moved at age 2 to Ellensburg, Washington. “The town I grew up in was like 8,000 people and the second largest rodeo in the nation at the time,” he says. “So it wasn't like you had a lot of your friends over for Egyptian food. You know, your house smelled different. But my mom had seven brothers and sisters who all lived within 100 miles of us, so the weekends were always 30 to 40 people at a house, surrounded by food all day long. The part of Egyptian food that I knew was really about my mom's and my aunts’ cooking.”

After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in New York’s Hyde Park, Mina worked at Charlie Palmer’s Aureole and Hotel Bel-Air with George Morrone — with whom he moved to San Francisco to open seafood restaurant Aqua in 1991, and a Las Vegas outpost in 1998. Diners embraced Mina’s flavorful approach to cooking, and he earned the James Beard Best Chef: California award in 2002 and has a Michelin star for his first eponymous eatery in San Francisco. Upon teaming with tennis great Andre Agassi in 2002, Mina founded the MINA Group — behind over 30 restaurant concepts around the world, including PABU, Sorelle, MINA’s Fish House, The Bungalow Kitchen and Bourbon Steak (which has a 10-year-old outpost at Glendale’s The Americana at Brand as well as one in Orange County).

His restaurant concepts ranged from American to Japanese to Italian, and he published a debut cookbook when he left Aqua, but nearly a decade ago, Mina embarked on another book project. “I wanted to wait and do it towards the end of my career, because there was a really specific goal for it: the goal was to go back to Egypt,” he says. “I worked on the book for seven years. I went to Egypt six times. … My Egypt is kind of my journey with Egypt.”

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Mina honed in on the idea for a cookbook ( My Egypt: Cooking from My Roots , Hachette Book Group, October 2024) and a restaurant when he introduced a test kitchen in San Francisco for a concept called Middle’terranea. “I did not want to do this early in my career — I wanted to make this something that had a real depth of  cuisine,” he says. “People were blown away by it. And it wasn't a huge departure from how I cook, because a lot of my cooking style came from what I ate growing up. So much of it was very bold in flavor, because my mom would cook food that was high acid, high sweet, high spice, high fat, because that’s what this food is.” Leaning into the Greek influence on Egyptian food, after the pandemic hit, he also opened the now-closed Greek restaurant Ornos in San Francisco. But both concepts — and his travels to Egypt — helped him refine his vision.

“There isn't anyone higher up in the culinary world that's taken Egyptian food to another level,” Mina says. “I wanted to really get that foundation of those staple items — falafel, which is called ta’ameya , mulukhiyah , but then, some of the other ones that I grew up eating, from the feteers to the aish baladi — and elevate the dish with product, technique and innovation.”

Mina happened upon several discoveries. “Number one is, my father spent a lot of time in Alexandria, and he really loved that coastal, Mediterranean-style food, so that's what we mostly ate,” he says. “A lot of it had an enormous amount of Greek influence, which makes sense with how much time Egypt was ruled by the Greeks and Romans. And then, the whole Middle East, there's a lot of similarities.” He learned Egyptian falafel is made with fava beans, that "foie gras started in Egypt, and beer and wine” and he did research into what the pharaohs ate. This all informed his Egyptian-Mediterranean restaurant concept Orla , which debuted first in Vegas’ Mandalay Bay and opened at the new Recent Santa Monica Beach hotel in late October.

“Santa Monica was supposed to open first, but it got pushed back,” he says. “Vegas ended up opening first, which was great, because we really have been able to refine things … we got to work on so many different spice blends and dishes.”

The former Loews Hotel at 1700 Ocean Ave. transformed into a Regent , in what marks the brand’s return to L.A. and first U.S. flagship. “The company is called Strategic Hotels, and I have a lot of properties with them,” Mina says. “One of my most successful restaurants in the company that’s been around forever, the Four Seasons Bourbon Steak, D.C., I have with them. I did the Essex House with them in New York, and they really went for it,” he adds of one of his newest openings and first in Manhattan.

Strategic Hotels also pushed the boundaries in executing Mina’s vision for the Santa Monica location. He notes, “A lot of what we wanted to do with the room was a big commitment for the hotel partner, and they did it, and we were able to move the bar to where I really felt like it needed to be, and do the design in a way that really opened the place up and let you enjoy how dynamic that location is because of the views.”

Interior design firm AvroKO designed the 270-seat space, which references the Mediterranean beaches and aquatic tale The Odyssey through a main dining room, an outdoor seating area and a private dining room that evokes a deep-sea voyage with plank flooring from luxury yachts. Handcrafted in Italy, an octopus mosaic floor in the main dining room is comprised of 300,000 hand-shaped tesserae tiles, and above, Pretorius Studio created an octopus mural inset in the ceiling. “That was very similar to my logo for Aqua, way back in the day — that was the inspiration,” says Mina of the mosaic. “This is the first [location] that will have the giant fish display, and it’s going to be surrounded by all these different spice blends we’ve done.”

The menu features a number of items from Mina’s childhood that he’s reimagined, like a tuna crudo made out of falafel — “that would be one of my favorites, because I grew up eating it,” he says.

“Then there’s the feteer , a laminated pastry that you layer with butter. They call it like Egyptian pizza, but it’s almost [like] a croissant. And we do it with this cream that’s called ashta , like a really rich creme fraiche, and caviar. When I was a kid, my mom would make it for me with butter and powdered sugar and jam as a breakfast item.”

A lobster salad incorporates the mangoes that in Egypt, are as pervasive as pineapples in Hawaii. “In season, there’s like 19 different varieties, and we’ve been able to source some of those in the United States,” he says. The menu also features a classic Greek salad with feta, like one his mother made, and a charcoal-grilled octopus he loves.

“When you get to the fish dishes, that’s when you really start to see more of the Greek influence, because of Alexander the Great and Alexandria,” Mina says. “So you see things like a baked snapper with some Middle Eastern spices. It’s a very classic Greek [preparation], to bake the fish on the potatoes and the fennel and the onions and with olives and tomatoes. Then one of my real favorite dishes is the salt-baked sea bream. That leans much more on the Greek side, but it’s something my mom would do, and she would wrap the fish with fig leaves, and pour salt all over it. We do it the same way — we [made] a more dynamic presentation that you crack at the table, but it’s simple, with sliced zucchini, olive oil, capers, lemon. Just really clean, delicious eating.”

The menus in L.A., including the desserts (an Egyptian mango tart, 24k golden baklava sundae), are more expanded, and this location also serves lunch — both a la carte and a prix fixe, which starts with five or six mezzes for the table, served with warm pita, and includes an entrée and sides. “So it’s really fun eating, and that doesn’t exist in Las Vegas,” says Mina, who calls out some other dishes unique to this location. “One of them is a staple that I grew up with: You get this beautiful braised lamb shank in spicy tomato sauce. And then you’ve got koshari , which is chickpeas, lentils and orzo, and it’s got a little sautéed onion puree and [an] assortment of spices.”

Pair dishes with more than 800 wine bottle options and 40 wines by the glass — from Napa and Europe, as well as underrepresented regions such as Lebanon, Corsica and Macedonia. Or, opt for one of Orla Bar’s signature cocktails, like the Arabian Nights Negroni, the Every Time I Come Here, I Must Get One espresso martini, the Santorini Sun mezcal concoction or the Magic Carpet Ride, with vodka, clementine rose petals and hibiscus orange blossom.

Mina, who also previously helmed Mother Tongue at Heimat, plans to continue building his restaurant portfolio on the West Coast and beyond. “I spend a lot of time in L.A.,” he says. “Of course, there’s opportunity there. There’s great food scene that just keeps getting better and better.” Next, he’ll open outposts of Bourbon Steak in Delray Beach, Florida and Las Vegas — in the Four Seasons hotel location previously occupied by his mentor Palmer. His Michael Mina restaurant at the Bellagio just celebrated 25 years.

“There’s no way one person can have this type of an impact and be able to do these restaurants,” says Mina, who attributes his success to his longtime team. “For us, a group that opens a few restaurants every year, we went three years with just opening one restaurant and retooled the full company so that we could get back to this point, and we got very focused on saying what matters to us.”

He adds, “We’re going to keep doing what we do, partnering with good hotels, good casinos, and trying to open good restaurants — really, really great restaurants, that are meaningful.”