My Favorite Place for Soup Is Hidden in a Pizza Restaurant

This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to our very opinionated editors’ favorite things to eat, drink, and buy.

The best place for soup in New York City is inside a pizza place you would easily walk by without noticing. Tucked in the front corner of Pizza Paradise is Taste of Persia, a not-quite-restaurant that serves a rotating set of Persian dishes. Both the beef kebab and the fesenjan, a chicken stew with walnuts and pomegranate, are excellent. But I’m there for the ash reshteh, a hearty vegetarian soup I will eat not only in the winter but also during a humid summer day if I find myself within five blocks of the storefront.

What makes this beans-and-greens soup so excellent? It’s the fact that there are so much of both. That means five kinds of beans: split peas, lentils, chickpeas, red kidney beans, and black beans. As for the greens, there are scallions and spinach, plus tons of herbs (parsley, cilantro, and mint). It almost sounds like too much going on, but the result is a fragrant amalgam of a whole lot of goodness. It’s like when you have a party and invite exactly the right number of people so that it feels full but not too crowded. Except…it’s soup.

My favorite part is the toppings: fried mint, kashk (Persian whey), and crunchy onions and garlic. They counteract the rather goopy soup to give it some lovely texture. And I haven’t even mentioned the noodles! There are also thin linguine noodles!

So get some soup, get some chicken, and, if you want, get some pizza too. They aren’t meant to go together, but sometimes at a party you end up having a conversation with someone you didn’t expect to, and it works out pretty damn great.

Go there: Taste of Persia

Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit