Bittersweet: Persepolis returns to normal

But the khoresht fesenjan at this Persian restaurant is as good as in Iran.

Matt McAllesterJuly 15, 2009 05:27Updated May 30, 2010 12:00

A waiter prepares food to be served to customers at a traditional restaurant during celebrations for the "Yalda Night" festival in central Tehran, Dec. 21, 2007. Yalda Night is an Iranian festival originally celebrated on the last night of autumn, the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Many Iranian families hold parties or visit traditional tea houses during the festival, where they eat dried nuts and fruit while reading poems by the revered Iranian poet Hafez. (Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters)

In Bittersweet, a new column on GlobalPost, Matt McAllester writes about how food connects us and the people who cook it to faraway lands. McAllester is also the author of "Bittersweet: Lessons from my Mother’s Kitchen."

NEW YORK — As the protests grew on the streets of Tehran last month, Iranian-Americans poured into Persepolis restaurant on Manhattan's Upper East Side to share their excitement. To swap news from home. To imagine returning to a country no longer controlled by a theocracy.

Ardeshir thought they were nuts.

“I was telling them, ‘Wake up, use your brain, it’ll never happen,’" said Ardeshir, one of the owners of Persepolis. (Ardeshir is not his real name; he wanted to be able to speak frankly without being harrassed by officials on his visits to Iran.)

“You’re talking about the government that has their own army,” he continued. “The [vigilante Islamist group the] Basij is their own army. They get paid to protect the government, not to protect you and me.”

Persepolis is one of the best-known Iranian restaurants in New York and so it is a natural meeting place for Iranian-Americans when there’s something big going on back home. And that’s what happened in mid-June when the protests against perceived flaws in the presidential election erupted. Other customers, sympathetic with the protesters they were seeing on television, came too.

“In the beginning I was getting lots of Americans,” Ardeshir said. “They said, ‘We’ve never been here but we heard about Persia. We’ve come to see what’s going on.’" As the protests intensified, he had "lots of Iranians coming. They want to talk to each other to express their feelings.”

And then the government cracked down. Protesters were shot dead, beaten, imprisoned and mainly kept off the streets. The Iranian-Americans who came to celebrate at Persepolis stayed home.

“I don’t see them now because they realize the honeymoon is over,” Ardeshir said.

As the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities have gone quiet, so has Persepolis. By the time I went there at the end of June, the place was charming but subdued, as if there was nothing in particular happening in the home country of the owners. There were a couple of Iranian families at larger tables but the rest of the customers seemed to be non-Iranians.

The food, however, was as Iranian as anything I’ve ever eaten in Tehran. The menu is purely traditional and so it instantly satisfied my craving for the Persian dish I prize above all others: khoresht fesenjan. Khoresht means stew but fesenjan is more of a smooth curry-like dish than a chunky, sloppy Irish stew-like thing. And it’s heavenly. Finely chopped or ground walnuts give the fesenjan sauce its texture and pomegranate syrup creates a sweet but not overwhelming taste that envelops the chicken, duck or meatballs in the dish. I’m a chicken guy, myself, and happily it’s chicken in the Persepolis fesenjan.