Faisal’s warm smile greeted us as we walked into 3Cents Resto & Café, a Yemeni café located in a strip mall off Bank Street.

Without skipping a beat, he put a pot of kadak chai, the sweet and milky tea served across South Asia, on the stove and beckoned us to a table near the counter.

Photos of Arab singers and movie stars adorn the walls of this popular Yemeni café buzzing with activity even at 10 p.m. on a Wednesday evening. Books line wall-length shelves and the ceiling is decorated with thick-fibred rope to give the ceiling the appearance of a Gulf dhow.

We learned about 3Cents from a message from Eat the Strip reader, Ann. She was also the source of our tip about Moul Hanout—a Moroccan restaurant that blew us away last year. If you want a cappuccino along with your liver-and-onion breakfast, she wrote, then 3Cents might be worth checking out. As she has a knack for discovering delicious eateries tucked away in strip malls, we knew we were in for a treat.

So, after a leisurely day at the Nordik Spa-Nature in Chelsea, Eat the Strip went along with two of our friends—Kapil Mehra and Matthew Couto—to check out the restaurant. (The former wrote our review for Semsem.

We ordered the chicken platter and fava bean platter. Both dishes came with a generous portion of tandoori bread, which we used to dip into our curries.

The diced chicken was garnished with diced green chillies and black pepper. Tart and spicy in equal measure, the dish was flavourful and it didn’t take long for the three of us to polish it off.

The fava beans were clearly the crowd favourite. Served in a piping hot stone dish, it was the perfect antidote to the cold weather outside. It tasted like a cross between a Mexican dish—with the quintessential kick of lime—and a spicy Indian curry.

“It hurts so good,” Matt said of the temperature. Kapil tried to get bits of onion, beans and chillies in each scoop of his tandoori naan. It’s kind of like guacamole, where “you want to scoop up all the good bits,” he added.

We took sips of chai between bites, using a saffron-infused sugar stick to sweeten the tea. Faisal told us about the Egyptian and Yemeni origins of the food, while patrons sipped their tea and chatted away.

In total, our meal cost us around $50. We left already dreaming about our next meal at the cafe. Perhaps a breakfast, sipping cappuccino and digging into spicy liver.