Alborz=Sounds Like Al Gore but Much Yummier

After learning about the various influences on Indian food, I'd been wanting to try some Middle Eastern food, some Ethiopian food and maybe even attempt Greek again (since my one experience at a Greek restaurant in Chicago in early October of 2001 after a very wet and cold day of shopping left me hardly impressed). With these yearnings in mind, the husband and I took advantage of the boy's Spring Break getaway to try a new restaurant--twice.

Alborz Persian Cuisine is a sponsor of the local public radio station, which we both listen to frequently (yes, we are pathetic flaming liberals), so I guess its ads worked on us. Luckily too it's not far from home, and we opted to try its weekend lunch buffet. Now I realize that some restaurants don't exactly put out their finest fare on for lunch buffets, but we've found that buffets are a nice way to sample new-to-us cuisine. We eat out relatively rarely, and we don't want to order "blind" a la carte and wind up with food we don't really like. If the food from the buffet is good enough to intrigue our palates, then we'll probably be back to order a la carte--or just become big fans of the buffet.

The Alborz lunch buffet offered a nice variety of its a la carte menu. On our first outing, I had some rice with lentils and raisins scented with turmeric (very tasty), some "gourmet" leg of lamb (looked and tasted like Mum's pressure cooker pot roast and the beef aloo at Indian Palace), a mixed veggie dish of yellow squash, zucchini, carrots and onions (I'm a sucker for zucchini, but the availability of yellow squash and carrots was a fabulous bonus), a nibble of baked chicken (disappointing), chicken breast and beef shish kabob pieces (pretty tasty, but, really, grilled meat is grilled meat) and, what I think is the discovery of our outings to Alborz, khoresh gheymeh, a stew of yellow split peas, onions and beef in a saffron-tomato sauce.

Dessert offerings consisted of sholeh zard, rice pudding with rosewater, saffron and cardamom, and this cake that...well, I'm having a hard time identifying. Don't get me wrong--it's fabulous cake with a wonderful texture and flavor that people who grew up on Betty Crapper and Dinky Hines and Pillsblechy box cakes might find "exotic" wit its hints of what I'm pretty sure are cardamom, pistachio, almond and cinnamon. Looking at it, the cake appears somewhat similar to a spice cake from a box, but not as dark. And this is why I'm having problems identifying what kind of cake it is because Alborz has two pastry-ish items on its menu: baghlava (Persian baklava, which is slightly different from its Greek cousin, but I'm not entirely sure how since I have only a passing familiarity with the whole baklava family) and roulette, a rolled Persian cake. The cake on the buffet certainly isn't rolled with whipped cream, sliced peaches and pistachios.

While doing a bit of research for this post, I suspect that what I enjoyed both times at Alborz is Persian love cake. I came across a recipe for a Persian love cake that might be similar to what goes into the cake I enjoyed. Trying to find images of Persian love cake through Google was a bust, but if my taste buds are functioning somewhat adequately, I do think I've loved me some Persian love cake. (If, Gentle Reader, you've enjoyed Persian food yourself and might be able to identify the cake, please lemme know.)

The husband enjoyed the sour cherry saffron rice. I thought it was good, but I'm not a big fan of cherry flavor. Not that it had a tremendous amount, but I just...I'd prefer to use my calories on other things. But who doesn't love pink rice grains? Persians did and continue to do some really amazing and creative things with simple rice, and seeing just a sampling of such dishes was a hoot.

Damn Good Bread, Bar Nun
Okay, maybe barring naan. And roti. And paratha--which might be the same as roti. And chapati.

Anywho, the bread available at Alborz is traditional nun--or nan-e barbari, as I found it dubbed when searching Google for an image. Nun (or nan) is very, very similar to naan except that it has some herb spice added atop--or at least I think it was an herb. I tasted a very subtle hint of what might be oregano, but none of the recipes I've found thus far for nun/nan list that as an ingredient. Maybe it's my imagination.

Y'know, I think Americans are really, really missing out with their fluffy loaf breads. At this point, give me a good flat bread if you must give me bread. Naan is fabulous, as is its (probable) cousin nun. Pitas are great, and tortillas are terrific. I'm looking forward to trying the bread that's served with Ethiopian that serves at that cuisine's plate and eating utensil. I'm sure there are other flat breads out there waiting for me to try, and to that I say, "Hot damn!"

D'you Want Fries With That?
On our return trip to Alborz, I was looking forward to revisiting the khoresh gheymeh because it had an almost sweet but nevertheless hearty flavor, and I love me some lentils. Lentils are a great food to have in your regular eating routine, Gentle Reader. They're pretty rich in fiber, iron and vitamin B9 (folate), and they seem to help stabilize blood sugar, which is great if you're trending toward diabetes or are just minding your blood sugar because of the evidence pointing to the relationship between insulin and fat storage.

Imagine my horror, then, when I was making my way toward the chafing dish of khoresh gheymeh and found French fries piled atop. Egads! I cried silently. They've ruined a perfectly good stew by piling yesterday's leftover fries atop it to make it more appealing to Whitey McWhitey! Needless to say, at that moment, my warm feelings toward Alborz diminished slightly right then and there, Gentle Reader.

But that didn't stop me from plunging the spoon deep into the chafing dish to serve me up some lentil-y goodness. Twice.

Since then, though, I might have discovered that the French fries atop the khoresh gheymeh might not have been the abomination I thought they were. While searching for a recipe for this delightful stew this morning, the first one I opened includes in its list of ingredients one pound of potatoes "for french fries." I haven't yet had time to dig further and determine how authentic the fries might be, but this discovery does cast some doubt on my assumption that the fries crowning the stew might be legit. I mean, hell, even Wikipedia notes that khoresh gheymeh's traditional ingredients of cubed lamb, yellow split peas, onion and dried lime are "combined with either thin French fries or eggplants."

Maybe it's just me, Gentle Reader, but isn't there a world of difference between French fries and eggplant?