The Best Persian Food in New York Comes From the Front Window of a Pizza Shop

In the glitz and polish of Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood, it is easy to walk past Pizza Paradise. With its frayed green awning and fluorescent lighting, this pizzeria looks almost out of place amidst the trendy specialty bakery across the street or the children’s bookstore next to it. Notice the front windows on the left, though, and you’ll find Saeed Pourkay, slight of stature and thick of mustache, hunched over his dishes in his window-display food counter. And when you walk inside, the smell of marinara sauce and freshly baked crust mingles curiously with that of rose water and saffron. At this tiny workspace by the window of the pizzeria, Pourkay has been serving New Yorkers what his growing group of avid fans deem to be the best Persian food in the city.

Surrounded on three sides by casserole dishes, rice cookers, and boiling soup pots, Pourkay serves specialties such as āsh reshteh (a thick bean-and-noodles soup that takes eight hours to make and gets garnished with dried mint and dollops of tangy kashk), fesenjān (a meat stew with a walnut-pomegranate molasses base), and gheimeh bademjan (a beef stew with yellow split peas and eggplant). Most of it is served with fragrant saffron rice.