Feature article
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Dining at Aladdin’s a magical experience
By Fred Sauceman
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| John Faiz and his wife Kabira will gladly guide diners through their Persian menu. |
If you want to help revitalize downtown Kingsport, eat yogurt. Or drink it. And do it at Aladdin’s Cuisine and Broadway Café, on Broad Street.
John Faiz and his family have been selling high-quality carpets and rugs on the corner of Broad and Center for close to 20 years. Now they’ve ventured into kabobs, in the old Nettie Lee building.
The restaurant opened 15 months ago, specializing in the cuisine of Persia. It’s a cooking style we have appreciated for two decades, and, as far as I know, Aladdin’s is the only restaurant in the region that serves it.
Persian is one of the world’s oldest and most varied cuisines. It’s also one of the healthiest and most colorful. Stewy dishes combine beef and cherries or chicken and peaches. Salads feature fresh herbs. The tartness of lemon juice, pomegranate syrup, and yogurt is prized.
What attracted us to Persian cooking at first was its use of rice. Kabobs, whether chicken, lamb, or beef, ground or in chunks, are accompanied by generous mounds of saffron-flavored, long-grain rice.
For the diner unfamiliar with Persian food, kabobs would be a good place to start. Meat on a stick, grilled over an open fire, is our most ancient cooking method. Aladdin’s lamb kabob is marinated boneless lamb tenderloin with a side of Basmati rice and grilled tomatoes.
Ash (pronounced like saying AH for the doctor) means soup in the Farsi language. Aladdin’s offers two — one with barley, lentils, red beans and vegetables, and another with vermicelli noodles, rice, red kidney beans, split peas, and spinach. Both are finished with kashk, a yogurt-based topping.
A favorite appetizer at Aladdin’s is kashk o bademjan. Bademjan means eggplant in Farsi. If you see the word “must” (sometimes written as mast), that’s an indication of the presence of yogurt. John makes it himself. In one appetizer, it’s blended with cucumbers and herbs. In another, with garlic. If you want a really authentic Persian drink, in addition to tea, order dough. It’s yogurt mixed with water and mint.
Torshi are pickles. Dolmeh are stuffed grape leaves. And polo is one of the hallmarks of the Persian table. A polo is a composed rice dish. In other words, rice mixed with other foods. And this is where the creativity and variety of the Persian kitchen are most evident.
Zereshk polo combines chicken with currants. Albalo (or albaloo) means cherries, and in albalo polo, they intermingle with rice and dark meat chicken. Baghala polo is made with fresh dill and baby lima beans. Shirin (or shirini) polo is a marriage of chicken, almonds and orange peel.
Persian cuisine also depends heavily on stews called khoreshes (don’t pronounce the k). The word is related to the word curry, and stews serve a similar function. They are served over rice. One of the national dishes of Iran, undoubtedly, is khoreshe ghormeh sabzi (English transliterations of all these words vary). Literally it means stew of green vegetables. Aladdin’s version consists of green onions, parsley, spinach, beef, and red beans. Beans or blackeyed peas are common in the dish, as is the use of lemon juice.
You’ll also find a khoreshe made with eggplant and lamb shanks and one with lamb and split peas at Aladdin’s.
Pomegranates are trendy today and touted as health food, but Persians have been eating them for several thousand years. They’re beginning to appear in grocery stores about now. Cut one open and notice how the seeds look like little rubies. They’re often used as a garnish for polos.
In the stew called khoreshe fesenjan, the sour flavor Persians admire is achieved with the use of a thick, dark pomegranate syrup. This chicken dish is further thickened with finely chopped walnuts.
Pages 94-96 of my copy of “In a Persian Kitchen,” copyright 1960, is stained with pomegranate syrup, tomato sauce and cinnamon, from my repeated preparations of this dusky stew. In Persia, it’s traditionally served during the cold weather months, often with duck or pheasant. But at Aladdin’s, the chicken version is on the menu all year.
Among the desserts at Aladdin’s is baklava. Whereas Greek baklava is usually made with walnuts, honey, and cinnamon, the phyllo leaves in Persian baklava are filled with almonds or pistachios, rosewater, and cardamom. And if you’d like a Near Eastern take on funnel cakes, try zooloobia (sometimes spelled zoolbia or zulbia).
If you’re new to Persian food, here are a couple of tips. First, don’t be intimidated by the names. The pronunciations are not difficult, and all the dishes are numbered. Most importantly, John and his wife Kabira, who is from Morocco (we talked couscous, tagine and preserved lemons) will graciously and patiently help you through the menu.
And don’t be put off by the weekend belly dancers. On our last visit, the performers were a harmless, matronly lot more concerned with balancing baskets on their heads than titillating diners.
I hope the Tri-Cities area will join me in supporting the Faiz family as they celebrate these enticing tastes.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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