That rather impressive garnish is an entire pickled lime.
When my co-worker Kamal went to his native Iran this past summer for the first time in several years, I asked him what he was looking forward to the most. He could have fed me some sentimental line about seeing how the country had changed, or something like that. Instead, he paused, and with a dreamy look in his eye, said, “Probably the pastries.” Kamal’s honesty and love of food are just two of the things I like about him.
Another thing I like is that he was so determined to score some good Persian food this week that he decided to take me and a couple of other people from the office to the Pars Grill in Chelsea and teach us a thing or two about the cuisine of his homeland. I’m not sure what I was anticipating from Persian food, but I had some notion that it would be akin to what I think of as generic Middle Eastern fare, with most vegetarian food running in the hummus and falafel vein. But I was dead wrong; it was really unlike anything I’d eaten before.
To drink, I ordered a savory yogurt beverage called doogh, which, admittedly, is sort of an unfortunate name, but which couldn’t have been more delicious. It was thick and rich and icy and flavored with dill and mint and probably lots of other things that were beyond my powers of identification. Seriously, it was probably the best drink to pass my lips since that crazy coconut shake in Canada, and I still find myself daydreaming about that thing months later. It was so good that it made me feel a little drunk even though there was no alcohol involved.
But it’s not like the food was anything to sneeze at, either. Early highlights included some delicious bread (similar to pita bread, but crisper) and an eggplant appetizer called kashk-e bademjan, which had the consistency of babaganouj but was spiced completely differently and garnished with ground pistachio. Even my devoutly eggplant-hating coworker Devin had to concede that it was pretty good.
As for main courses, it’s true that the menu catered mainly to meat eaters. The massive size of the grilled meat slabs that everyone else ordered spurred multiple conversations about The Flintstones. But I was pleased that they had at least five vegetarian choices that I’d never heard of before, mostly stews in which the traditional beef had been replaced by mushrooms. I tried the ghormeh sabzi, a blend of ground parsley and coriander, red beans and pickled lime served with saffron rice. (I almost went in for a “rice upgrade,” like one diner at our table did, and while I have to say that his sour cherry rice was pretty great, there was already a lot going on in my dish, so maybe it was best that I exercised a tiny measure of restraint.) The ghormeh sabzi was subtle and unique; the texture and the pickled lime gave it an Indian flavor, but it was much more aromatic-spicy than hot-spicy. Even Kamal, who was highly skeptical of the mushroom substitution, gave it a thumbs up, saying that the mushrooms “did not damage the flavor too much.”
There have been a lot of headlines lately about Iran’s new president and some possible, albeit gradual, headway toward an easier relationship between Iran and the U.S. I’m no foreign policy expert, but I hope that this means a greater cultural exchange as well. I’ll raise a glass to anything that brings some more doogh into my life.