At her first restaurant, the chef Nasrin Rejali serves dishes from all over her native Iran, including fesenjan (top), a sweet-and-sour stewed chicken topped with pomegranate seeds.Photographs by Cole Wilson for The New Yorker
At dinner recently, an Iranian American friend taught me a term in Farsi: lebos polo khori, which means, essentially, “finest attire” but translates literally to “rice-eating clothes.” We should have been in black tie, considering how much rice was piled on the table in front of us at Nasrin’s Kitchen, a new Persian restaurant in midtown. Nasrin Rejali, an Iranian refugee who moved to Queens, by way of Turkey, in 2016, earned a following with a series of pop-ups—which served traditional dishes from all over her native country—before opening her own place last month.
Kuku sabzi—dill, cilantro, and parsley, held together with a bit of egg—is served in wedges, with olives, pickles, and tomatoes.
Several of the plates we ordered came from a section of the menu entitled Chelo Khoresh, or stew with rice. The khoresh-e ghormeh sabzi, a forest-green stew made with tender chunks of beef, fat kidney beans, fried herbs, fenugreek, and sun-dried limes, arrived with a separate platter of rice, the top layer of grains tinged orange with saffron, a small square of crispy tahdig (bottom-of-the-pot rice) as garnish. For a dish called zereshk polo ba morgh, the rice dominated: you could barely see the chicken legs, braised in saffron and tomato, buried beneath basmati adorned with tart barberries, glistening like rubies, shards of pistachio, slivers of almond, saffron oil, and more tahdig.
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The restaurant is casual, but the dining room, on the second floor of a midtown town house, is imbued with a faded glamour befitting Rejali’s heirloom recipes.
Rice—along with grilled peppers and tomatoes, raw red onion, and fresh basil—also accompanied the menu’s kebabs: koobideh, made with a combination of ground lamb and beef, and juicy chunks of boneless chicken, marinated in saffron and lemon juice. Rice was wonderful mixed with Rejali’s yogurt dips: the thicker, more sour mast mosir, made with Persian shallots and nigella seeds, and the sweeter mast khiar, with cucumber, raisins, sunflower seeds, dried mint, and dried rose petals. For Rejali’s superlative dolmeh barg mo, which she makes according to her mother’s recipe, rice was wrapped—with yellow split peas, barberries, tarragon, basil, cilantro, and onion—in silky grape leaves, simmered in pomegranate molasses, and served warm.
For the zereshk polo ba morgh (left), chicken braised in tomato and saffron is blanketed in basmati rice. The chelo khoresh-e ghormeh sabzi (right) is made with fried herbs, braised beef, kidney beans, and sun-dried limes.
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There were dishes without rice, too, including kuku sabzi—which is sometimes likened to a frittata but could also be described as a heap of herbs (dill, cilantro, parsley) combined with barberries, garlic, and walnut and held together by a bit of egg—and mirza ghasemi, a luscious eggplant-and-tomato dip topped with a fried egg and accompanied by freshly baked flatbread. Most patrons were not dressed in rice-eating clothes; more than one was wearing scrubs. But the marble-walled dining room, on the second floor of a century-old town house, is imbued with a certain formality, a faded glamour befitting the preservation of this ancient and enduring cuisine. (Dishes $9-$30.) ♦
Published in the print edition of the August 14, 2023, issue, with the headline “Nasrin’s Kitchen.”
Hannah Goldfield, a staff writer covering restaurants and food culture, received a 2024 James Beard Award for her Profile of the chef Kwame Onwuachi.
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