About

My mother cooked tahdig without a timer. She'd stand over the pot and listen to it. The window between perfect and burnt is about three seconds.

In more than thirty years in her kitchen in Tehran, I never saw her miss it.

She didn't write recipes down. If I asked how much saffron, she'd pinch her fingers and say this much. This much was the difference between a stew that tasted like home and one that didn't. I learned to cook the way she cooked. By sound and smell, mostly.

My father ran the door. Whoever showed up ate, and ate well, and nobody had to explain why they were there. That was the rule of the house. Hospitality wasn't a service in our family. It was how you treated people, and the food was the proof.

I didn't go into restaurants right away. I spent more than twenty years in hardware — PCs and consumer electronics, back when you still wrote in Fortran and Pascal and C and FoxPro and the machines you built were things a customer held in their hands. I was good at it and I liked the work. But the kitchen kept pulling at me, and eventually I stopped arguing with it.

I'll tell you why it was the same job.

One Thursday, a shipment landed at my office at 5pm. Ten units had to go out the door at 9am Friday. We looked at each other and did the math and nobody said it out loud but we all knew — we weren't going home. No one assigned blame. No one asked whose fault the timing was. We just started. By 7am Friday the units were built. By 8am they were on the truck. None of us had slept. Every one of us was smiling. The promise went out the door on time.

Years later, on a Saturday at 5pm, the phone rang at Shiraz. A woman was on the line. My staff thought it was a marketing call and almost put her through to voicemail, but she said it was important, so I took it. She needed food for forty-five people. Delivered to her house. By 7:30 that night. Today.

I asked her to repeat it back to me because I wanted to be sure I'd heard it right. It was 5pm. She wanted dinner for forty-five at 7:30pm, two and a half hours away, at her home. She said yes. And then she started crying. Her caterer had cancelled on her that afternoon. She had already been a guest at Shiraz and she told me she'd eat anything we could send.

The problem was that my own dining room was expecting a hundred and seventy people that night. My kitchen did not have enough food on hand for both.

I told her we'd do it.

I walked back into the kitchen on a Saturday night and told my team what we'd just agreed to. Nobody asked whose fault it was that someone else had cancelled on her. We just started. The food went out on time. Our own dining room had one of the best nights we'd had that season. On Monday she called to tell me what the other caterers had said to her when she'd called them in a panic that afternoon — that it was too late, that it was too hard, that they couldn't do it.

That's the whole job. In hardware and in a kitchen, once you've made the promise, there is no patch. The unit ships or it doesn't. The plate is on the table or it isn't. You either did the work upstream, and you have the right people standing next to you when the call comes in, or you didn't. Everything else is noise.

I opened Shiraz Kitchen in Westchester first. We earned a Bib Gourmand, then earned it two more years in a row. The New York Times called us Very Good. Wine Spectator gave us the Award of Excellence. We were supposed to open Chelsea in March of 2020. We opened in November instead. In September of 2022, a fire started in the print shop next door and took the Westchester building. We reopened in White Plains on April 27, 2023.

The awards are on the wall. What I'm actually proudest of is that the regulars still walk in like they're coming home.

Event after event, you learn things the brochure leaves out.

A dietary restriction is almost never a preference. It's somebody's seven-year-old with a peanut allergy, and a mother who's going to spend the whole night watching her kid's plate unless you make her believe you've got it. Lunch isn't at 12:20 — lunch is at 12:15, because that's when the CEO sits down. And the difference between a great event and a fine one is what happens in the ninety seconds when something goes wrong in the kitchen, and whether the room ever finds out.

The right answer is that the room never finds out.

That's what RezCasa is for. The food is the easy part once you've spent your life on it. The hard part is everything underneath — the timing, the judgment calls, the hundred small decisions between the order coming in and the plate going down. Most corporate catering treats all of that as overhead. I think it's the whole product.

And I know I'm not the only chef in this city who thinks so. There are restaurants across New York run by people as obsessive about their craft as I am about mine, and most of them have been quietly failed by the corporate catering market the same way I have. RezCasa is the platform I wish had existed when that woman called me at 5pm on a Saturday. A place where the answer is yes, and the people on the other end of the phone know exactly what that costs, and deliver it anyway.

My mother's standard. My father's rule about the door. Twenty years of keeping promises to people holding the thing I built. All of it pointed here.