Review: Maman Zari translates Iranian American tastes to a Persian escape in Chicago
There’s a constant sense of movement on the stretch of Kedzie Avenue that crosses the Brown Line tracks in the Albany Park neighborhood. It’s slow, but steady, and surprisingly dramatic. From too many drivers rushing to beat the gates, to families on foot pushing and pulling mountainous carts of all kinds.
Then there’s an escape from daily street life behind a discreetly screened storefront.
Maman Zari translates the wonder of Iranian American taste memories into an inventive Persian tasting escape in Chicago.
Mariam Shahsavarani opened the restaurant named after her late grandmother with chef Matteo Lo Bianco last summer.
Quite frankly it shouldn’t work. She was most recently a flight attendant, while he was a research and development chef for an airline catering company. It’s also the first business for both owners.
What they’ve created is a transportive experience. And somehow they’ve done it at $85 for nine seasonal courses, including a constantly changing amuse bouche. That’s a shockingly low price in the world of tasting menus that typically start at triple digits.
“We kind of want to do away with all of the airs,” Shahsavarani said. The menu and pricing allow people to try new dishes or familiar dishes reconceptualized, with friends and family, she added.
“It’s very innovative, with all the recipes from Persia,” Lo Bianco said.
That’s not quite true. They may be inspired by traditional dishes, but the creative courses are his.
Take, for example, the mirza ghasemi and sabzi khordan. The course is actually a collection of dishes, with soft eggplant under a smoky dome, and a fine herb fluff.
“It’s the only dish we have from day one,” the chef said.
Traditional mirza ghasemi does have smoked eggplant, Shahsavarani said, but usually scrambled eggs too, which they omitted because they felt it muted the flavors.
“It’s a dish from northern Iran,” she said. “I’ve had it at roadside places on the highway driving up to where my grandparents lived.”
So how did the chef transform the Persian eggplant dip into a course starring a sophisticated stuffed aubergine?
“It’s not only me,” Lo Bianco said. It’s Mariam and the team in the kitchen.”
They needed something crunchy, he added, so they made what he called tahdig chips with rice with saffron. They’re similar to Asian prawn crackers.
The course also includes a briny green olive relish and a nutty slice of barbari flatbread.
“Zeytoon parvardeh, that’s what the olives are based on,” Shahsavarani said. “That’s also from Mazandaran and Gilan in northern Iran.”
The course is a personal welcome platter, a snapshot of visits to the provinces along the Caspian Sea.
It’s become something of a signature at the first fine-dining Persian tasting menu restaurant in the city (and possibly the world) with an unlikely origin story.
“My father, he started the orchestration,” Shahsavarani said. He’s a retired food business consultant, she added, and this was a hobby for him, gathering the group of people, including his daughter, who would go on to start the restaurant.
She first met Lo Bianco more than a decade ago when he worked for her parents’ food manufacturing company.
“When we decided we wanted to open a restaurant, we wanted to make sure we could do something that was impactful,” Shahsavarani said. “We didn’t want to be another Persian restaurant in Chicago.”
They try to interpret lesser-known dishes, she added.
“As much as I love kebab, we didn’t need another restaurant that was kebab and rice in Chicago,” Shahsavarani said. “That was the inspiration behind doing a Persian tasting menu.”
I grew up going to Reza’s here. So when I moved to Los Angeles, and last lived in Beverly Hills, I went to Persian restaurants at least once a week with the expat community there.
Maman Zari is indeed not just another Persian restaurant, but a personal, emotional experience.
“Maman Zari is what my cousins and I called our grandmother,” Shahsavarani said. “She was my paternal grandmother.”
Zahra Shahsavarani was born and raised in Iran, and spent summers in Chicago, said her granddaughter.
“And then when I was older, and she couldn’t travel, I went over and spent a lot of time with her and my grandfather in Iran.”
Maman Zari died about a year and a half ago, said her granddaughter, before lending her name and silhouette to the restaurant.
Lo Bianco said he was born and raised in Milan, and immigrated here in 2003.
The chef offers three tasting menus: standard and vegetarian, which I had, and pescatarian, with dishes from the other menus.
They each began with an amuse bouche then the first course, a tiny vibrant bowl of ash-e anar, a pomegranate soup with lentils.
The smoky eggplant course followed with its lovely abundance.
Then a linear plating of salad-e laboo with red and golden beets nestled against goat cheese and herbs had a tableside pour of a refreshing pomegranate-tarragon dressing.
The unassuming ozonboron features perfectly grilled Persian sturgeon, but it’s the golden tomato saffron brown butter sauce that unexpectedly steals the show.
“People say I would lick the sauce off the plate,” Shahsavarani said laughing. “I don’t know what alchemy Matteo did, but the tomato saffron sauce on there, if that’s even what it is, is magical.”
The bad Chinese banquet diner in me wanted rice to savor that sauce.
“I put beurre blanc, rosemary and a touch of tomato saffron sauce,” Lo Bianco said on his variation of the French white butter sauce.
A wine pairing is available, but I turned to cocktails, nonalcoholic drinks and tea service on two visits.
The Gonabad Gin cocktail, radiant in a delicate coupe, is beautifully balanced with a saffron-infused spirit, poppy amaro liqueur, vermouth and herbal cloosterbitter. A Tehran spritz pours persimmon liqueur, orange amaro and sparkling wine in a flute heralding warmer weather to come. The nonalcoholic Sparkling Saveh drink thoughtfully mixes white tea, ginger and mint.
Shahsavarani said she took the lead on the entire beverage program.
“We don’t have a full cocktail program, because we don’t have a full bar,” she added. “So they’re limited to a few cocktails.”
There’s nothing limited about them. So much so that I hope they add her drink pairings to the menu.
But ambition comes with challenges.
On the standard tasting, the koofteh Tabrizi, a lamb and rice meatball, was a bit dry even with a bright pour of the straight tomato saffron sauce. The nardooni ordak with duck was, unfortunately, a touch tough, detracting from a plate artfully splattered with pomegranate.
On the vegetarian menu, three sweeter plates followed in succession. The stunning adas polo with a crisp cake of smoked basmati rice, date and raisin; a koofteh Tabrizi orb with chickpea, dried plum and caramelized onion; plus aloo esfenaj, a reimagined spinach and plum stew with a saffron tahdig cake on top.
I love sweet and savory, and the careful craft was evident, but this trio was far too similar in taste and texture on one progressive menu.
And I wondered why they didn’t go harder with any of the items they called tahdig. Any of the courses they accompanied begged for a hit of scorched rice.
“Tahdig seems like a very specific thing, but it is and it isn’t,” Shahsavarani said. Sometimes it’s bread, sometimes it’s potatoes, sometimes it’s just rice, she added, and sometimes it’s half an inch thick, but sometimes the thinnest layer of starch and oil.
As a crunchy crust lover, I acknowledge my bias.
As I do with the nan khamei, the Persian cream puffs. The shells were nice and light, but could have benefited from a little more crispness, extra rosewater essence in the cream and a bigger chocolate quenelle.
The shirini, though, traditional sweets transformed into four house-made cookies, were impeccable.
The buttery bite-size cake originally came from Shahsavarani, her only recipe on the menu.
I highly recommend pairing the mignardises with the house tea, black with bergamot and cardamom, served with a saffron garnished rock sugar stick.
And the service is exceptional in the minimalist dining room warmed by hints of yellow and blue. Friendly and knowledgeable, what’s even more impressive is that only one person in the front of the house has any experience with Persian food.
“That’s because she moved to the United States from Iran,” Shahsavarani said. “And she speaks Farsi fluently.”
I asked further about the restaurant’s identity.
“The whole reason we call the restaurant Persian instead of Iranian specifically was to give us a broader culinary landscape with which to work,” Shahsavarani said. “Because in our case, we’re referring to the former Persian Empire, which will allow us to pull in from what is now modern-day Armenia and Azerbaijan.”
And they can go a little bit farther east and a little bit farther west, she added, if they want to start pulling in a little bit more diversity.
“Shortly after opening, there was a comment that was like, I don’t understand why all these restaurants identify as Persian,” she said. “And I was like, I have a really good reason why.”
The menu will change twice soon. Once for an extended Nowruz celebration, beginning on Persian New Year, March 19 this year. And then again for spring.
The mirza ghasemi should be on the menu with its smoky eggplant, but if it’s not someday, I trust we’ll still find an inventive escape on a street of constant movement.
Maman Zari
4639 N. Kedzie Ave.
773-961-7866
Open: Tuesday to Thursday 5:30 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday 5 to 11 p.m., Sunday 5 to 10 p.m., closed Monday
Prices: $85 (standard, vegetarian and pescatarian tasting menus), $16 (Gonabad Gin cocktail), $13 (Sparkling Saveh nonalcoholic drink), $6 (Maman Zari house tea)
Noise: Conversation-friendly
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible with restrooms on single level
Tribune rating: Excellent, three stars
Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.
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