Premium catering and private events, finally local to Westchester.

"My mother Iran used to say the only thing that matters is that every person at your table feels like the most important person in the room, even if there are two hundred of them. That's the standard every RezCasa event is held to."

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 twenty 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 tech, building systems. I was good at it and I liked the work. But the kitchen kept pulling at me, and eventually I stopped arguing with it.

Turns out it's the same job. A line cook on a Saturday night and an engineer chasing a bug at 2 a.m. are both trying to make something complicated work without anyone seeing the seams. The difference is that in software, when something breaks, you push a fix. In a kitchen, the plate is already on the table.

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. In September 2022 a fire started in the print shop next door and took the building. We rebuilt in White Plains. Then we opened Chelsea.

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.

You learn that "dietary restrictions" 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. You learn that lunch isn't at 12:20. Lunch is at 12:15, because that's when the CEO sits down. You learn that 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.

My mother's standard, my father's rule about the door, and twenty years of fixing things that broke. All of it pointed here.

My mother set that standard in Tehran. I just brought it to yours.