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An evening photo of a steak shown on its side above a large flame.
Evening steak from Avi Cue
Wonho Frank Lee

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LA’s Underground Grill Master Fans the Flames of Instagram Envy

Avi Cue is the quarantine’s best social media follow, known for underground backyard steak parties with lots of decadence. Now he’s going legit with wagyu shawarma

Farley Elliott is the Senior Editor at Eater LA and the author of Los Angeles Street Food: A History From Tamaleros to Taco Trucks. He covers restaurants in every form, from breaking news to the culture, people, and history that surrounds LA's dining landscape.

It wouldn’t be quite fair to say that the Instagram stories of LA’s latest underground food star, Avi Cue, show a slow descent into madness. There’s too much precision in the backyard grill work being done for that. But still ... the flames, the obsession, the climbing smoke and falling rivulets of rendered fat over coals. There’s real mad scientist-meets-Dante’s Inferno vibes on the page, except instead of hell, it’s Sherman Oaks.

Avi Cue (as he’s known to his fans, though his real name is Aviad Yalin) is an Israeli-born meat connoisseur, known for his audacious displays of thick, fat-speckled bone-in chops, for smoked oxtail pulled off the bone and piled over freshly made hummus, and for an emerging series of shawarma pop-ups that use decadent wagyu beef on the slow-spinning spit.

Yalin’s first shawarma event, done inside of Slab on West Third Street, sold out basically as soon as it began, while another pandemic-era pop-up at Beverly Hills Jewish deli the Nosh had a line down the block. Since then Yalin has shaved meat into pitas at the famed Yamashiro in Hollywood as part of a deal with Off the Menu, and he’s got even more audacious plans for the near future. Now, if you’ll excuse him for just one moment, he has to go turn his marrow bones, pull out his just-crispy falafel, and check on his stuffed and smoked pitas, known in Lebanon as arayes, before they get too crispy.

A cast iron pan showing fresh bone marrow ready to be cooked.
Bone marrow beginnings
A cast iron pan showing grilled bone marrow and slow-cooked tomatoes.
Grilling in the pan
A wrapped piece of meat inside of an open smoker, complete with a hatchet handle.
The open smoker

“My family has always cooked outside,” says Yalin, who grew up in Israel with a farmer father and lots Lebanese and Syrian neighbors around, sharing in communal meals. He’s always been fascinated by whole animal cooking and working outdoors. “[I was] always standing by the fire, asking questions, even at six years old.”

A spontaneous trip to the United States led to a life here, landing in the San Fernando Valley among the city’s prodigious Israeli and Jewish population. Cooking meat and hosting friends remained a hobby, but it wasn’t until Yalin sold his business as an importer and installer of custom home cabinets — a job he says he left as a result of President Trump’s tariff escalations with China — that he became fascinated and singularly focused on grilling and smoking meat.

Today his backyard setup looks like an ad hoc sculpture garden. Coolers overflow with various cuts, and nearby a heavy metal pan on a stand is shadowed above by a grill grate that can be adjusted up or down for maximum closeness to the flames. A box smoker, a Santa Maria-style grill, and a horizontal offset smoker (the door’s opening handle is a hatchet, naturally) all sit side by side on a trailer; a butcher block table in the grass holds the spread.

A tall, thin man works an open grill with meat sizzling.
Avi at work

Friends like Yeastie Boys’s Evan Fox or Burt Bakman of Trudy’s Underground Barbecue and Slab pass through, some staying for the night, others for just a bite. It’s all captured on Instagram stories for fun, though there’s an undeniable “you weren’t at the party” feel when everyone starts posting steak photos at the same time.

Yalin insists that the real byproduct of the backyard sessions isn’t FOMO, it’s the information he gleans. He’s always tweaking techniques and working with different purveyors to score new product, from pita to tahini to ground beef. “I don’t make it just to look nice,” he says, “I just think that it’s the right way of cooking. When I have passion for something, I love to just to put in those hours and get that experience. If you do one steak, or a hundred steaks, that hundredth steak will look so much better.”

A closed smoker has a sign above it that reads ‘relax.’
An open fire box as part of a black metal meat smoker.
Half pitas stuffed with raw ground beef, called arayes.
Lebanese-style arayes, stuffed to perfection
Half pitas of stuffed meat ready to be grilled off.
Over the grill
Half pitas of grilled meat with tahini and amba on top.
Finished with tahini and amba

Now Yalin is ready to expand his repertoire, and his social circle, with an upcoming series of shawarma pop-ups around the city. He has been teasing one event for days, to be held on October 28 in the outside parking lot patio at West Hollywood hit Delilah. Yalin will be setting up his slow-spinning wagyu spit and shaving for expected crowds starting at 6 p.m., with the restaurant providing the seating, the drinks, and everything else.

Two stands of shawarma surrounded by a leafy tree.
Shawarma from the Yamashiro event
Liam Brown

“It’s the food I eat the most,” Yalin says of shawarma in general, particularly when he’s back in Israel, though he admits the wagyu version is a bit of ostentation borne out of his own carnivorous curiosity. “The first ones I did, they were not so good,” he says of his time cooking before landing on high-priced Australian wagyu cuts, prized in places like Brazil for its intensity and richness. “It has a lot of meat flavor, not quite as much fat or crazy marbling like the Japanese wagyu,” he says, but enough to power through a heavy scoop of tahini and spicy Iraqi amba. Yalin admits that sometimes all this meat can be too rich even for him, but pushing boundaries is part of the fun.

Next month, Avi Cue will tackle its biggest stage yet: the TCL Chinese Theatre (formerly Grauman’s), right on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It will be Yalin’s largest single showcase as a budding food personality, and another collaboration between the owners of Yamashiro, Avi Cue, and the Off the Menu team. The plan is to grow that event, and future ones, as big as possible in anticipation of opening a restaurant somewhere in the Valley, perhaps as soon as next year.

In the meantime, Yalin is back in his yard, shredding oxtail and turning steaks in the glow of an evening flame. It’s not madness, he insists, it’s passion — and it’s perfect for Instagram.

A freshly unwrapped piece of butcher paper shows loose oxtail meat still on the bone.
Smoked oxtail
Pulling meat off the tail bone for oxtail. Wonho Frank Lee
A heavy spoon used to drop hummus into a bowl.
Finishing a bowl of hummus with tahini and jalapenos.
Finishing a bowl of hummus with oxtail on top.

Oxtail on top

Falafel in a strainer ready to be eaten.
Falafel
Bone marrow over toast with a large ring of radish on top.
Bone marrow and radishes on toast
Yellow cauliflower pickled and put on a white plate.
Pickled vegetables made at home
A round white plate showing arayes and toast and pickled vegetables.

A deeply thick wagyu steak getting peppered from above.
Getting ready to grill potatoes fresh from a boiled pot.
A chef turns a steak over a large flame as night falls.
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