Starring Oula Hamadeh and Seira Emami. Rating unavailable.

Since it’s underrepresented to the point of virtual invisibility, let’s applaud writer-director Maryam Najafi for putting Vancouver’s Middle Eastern community on the big screen with this feature-film debut. Maybe it’s even possible to overlook the unevenness of the finished product. You’ll just need to squint really, really hard in some places.

Set in the restaurant of the title, which—unlike anything I’ve ever seen in our uptight little paradise—buzzes like a neighbourhood drop-in centre as much as an eatery, Kayan observes the exhausting routine of Lebanese single mom Hanin (Oula Hamadeh) as she manages not only her business but also her two teenage daughters, not to mention the matriarchal fixing-up she tends to provide to some of the staff and regulars. These include an incompetent chef, a lesbian waitress—what, there are Iranian lesbians?—and an unreasonably hot barfly (Seira Emami) who repeatedly dumps her young son on the overstressed restaurateur while she sits there nursing the bottle. Meanwhile, Hanin’s relationship with her never-glimpsed younger lover, Foad, might provide some unseen complications, with or without the extracurricular attention of smouldering piano student Pejman (Alireza Taale).

Kayan comes undone somewhere inside all these small, domestic tribulations, not helped by a lead performance from Hamadeh that sometimes reads more stiff than stoic. Yet she still exudes something, and when it clicks, so does the film. A bravura, smartly choreographed sequence involving a belly dancer shows us what Najafi is capable of, gliding between characters while advancing the plot in ways we don’t realize at first. It leaves us with a portent of what’s to come, both storywise and (hopefully) from the fresh talent behind the camera.