Killer 24 Hours of Food, Starring POTATO TAHDIG

In June, I wrote about a palatial Persian restaurant in Doha, Qatar I'd discovered while feverishly chowhounding online (the next best thing to eating!). The food looked crazy good (do check out the link if you missed it), and launched me on a whirlwind virtual tour of Persian cuisine, culminating in my discovery of potato tahdig.

Here's the original potato tahdig photo, plus some new ones I found here:

Tahdig is crunchy rice scraped from the bottom of the pot. Nearly every culture outside America and Canada makes and worships this, and they all give it a unique name (there's even a Wikipedia page listing many of them). I'm acquainted with most of those versions, but never imagined potato tahdig. Friend-of-the-Slog Paul Trapani mentioned it to a Persian-American co-worker, who casually replied that she and her mother make it all the time.

WHAT??????????????????

Fast forward a few weeks. The co-worker, Abby, offered to bring her mother's leftovers to work, under condition that we eat it first thing in the morning, for freshness. Since the office was far away and I'd need to be in full eating mode at dawn, I booked a hotel the night before, which necessitated ambitious dinner plans, so we hit Thai Angel way out in Suffolk County (just south of Long Island Expressway exit 57), a great place largely unknown to Tristate area food fans. I'd eaten there shortly after its opening, but hadn't been back in many years, and it's still great. We had Thai sausage fried rice (so moist and fluffy), pork larb (generous with the rice powder) and hot sweet basil duck, a recipe from the chef/owner's home region (I forget exactly where, but it's not as far north as Issan) that was crunchier than Crunch itself. All as great as ever. My photos, alas, have disappeared. But you may Yelp.

A few hours later, it was time for Persian breakfast. Behold the angelic baghali polo (dill rice with fava beans):

This is not an Eastern European application of dill which clings to your filthy beard as you slurp copious vodka. Who knew dill could be so classy? And the fava beans were sneaky. I've written previously about how the loftiest deliciousness calls scant conscious attention to itself as you consume it. It can be like a perfectly-synchronized highway merging, where nothing is perceived as changing. I'd barely welcomed the fava beans into my cellular structure before they'd begun making mysterious and wonderful adjustments to my mood and spirit from within.

And, finally, ladies and gentlemen, the new taste sensation of potato tahdig:

This was unlike any potato dish I've ever tasted. It happens sometimes (though rarely) that a region has such a firmly unfamiliar concept of a certain food that it exerts a gravitational force, pulling you to a place you've never been. It's "false nostalgia" galore as your view of potatoes shifts to that of Iranian grandmas who see potatoes very differently than you or I do.

The classic example of this for me is the use of coriander ("coentros") in the Portuguese region of Alentejo, south of Lisbon. There, and only there, coriander has an entirely different... I don't want to say "flavor", because it's the same coriander as anywhere else. But the effect is jarringly unique, and I doubt anyone will/could ever explain why. Alentejans just love coriander - and in a completely different way which bears no resemblance to the love shown in the world's other coriander hotspots. If you venture just an hour beyond Alentejo, coriander goes back to tasting like coriander. I never order açorda (bread soup) or porco Alentejana (pork and clams) unless the chef was born and raised in Evora. Otherwise, it will taste pedestrian. Unthrilling. Just some coriander thrown into your food.

After a lifetime spent madly infatuated with potatoes, I've found a fresh approach. A civilizational shift of spuds. I nearly ululated.

I'd planned to bring along my favorite Turkish pastry, burma kadayıf (which my smart phone app, Eat Everywhere, describes as "a tight, crunchy pistachio-filled braid of frizzy, buttery baked noodles soaked in syrup"). Nazar, a Turkish grill and grocery in Deer Park, normally carries pastries from fantastic Gulluoglu Cafe in Brooklyn, including their blessed burma kadayıf. However, Gulluoglu Cafe has closed (at least the Brooklyn store; their branches in Turkey remain open, for all the good that does me). So the owner of Nazar recommended this brand of frozen pastries from Turkey, which she promised was fantastic:

"Just defrost at room temperature and serve," she told me. I was skeptical, but it was fantastic. A whole other take on pistachios (yes, two civilizational shifts in one day!).

For lunch, I'd pushed for a visit to an untried Italian restaurant, Trullo D'Oro in Hicksville (here's their Yelp page, for more photos). For some forgotten reason, it had attracted my attention months ago from online photos. Unable to let go of the infatuation, I dragged the entire office (still groaning from rice, potato, and pastry breakfast) to this random place, which turned out to be great in several superlative ways.

It's the best Roman home-style restaurant I've found in America (it reminded me - and I am very aware of the gravity of this statement - a little bit of Mamma Grimaldi's cooking, being from the same area). It's the best Italian restaurant I currently know in Long Island. And it's just a great place, owned by an immigrant, Gino, who's totally into it. No fakery. No posing. No self-transformation into an pandering caricature from "the old country". It's just the real deal, without shtick or pretension. You could be There.

Bruschetta was quite good, though the tomatoes were second-rate.

The first-rate tomatoes (clearly from someone's garden) are reserved for the mozz-and-tomatoes. That's so Italian! When one of us asked for more balsamico, Gino jovially bellowed "No!" The balsamico, which is generously high quality, is reserved for this dish, apportioned in exactly this way, and is not some condiment to be freely lathered upon one's food like ketchup or mustard. That, too, is so Italian (an American might find this ungenerous, but it's simply correct).

We'd ordered three entrees for four people, a grave mistake/insult/blasphemy/catastrophe. Gino didn't make a fuss, but was far from happy about it. He hastily resolved our faux pas by offering to bring an off-menu pasta dish with breadcrumbs and squash. We meekly agreed, but he was already striding back to the kitchen with our order. And here's that dish:

It was the best thing. This simple concoction was a "10", and perhaps the best home-style pasta dish I've had in a restaurant outside Italy. I uttered the name of Mamma Grimaldi while eating it, feeling an immediate pang of stabbing shame and guilt, but then decided it was okay. She's better - much better! - but I think she'd approve.

Insanely great, insanely light, insanely fluffy, insanely delicious eggplant parm with perfect Italian-not-"Italian-American" vegetables done to the perfect point. No breadcrumbs coating the eggplant, just delicate egg and flour. The tomato sauce had the optimal acidity to offset the oiliness of the fried eggplant. Seriously, this is a whole other level.

Gnocci with potato and butternut squash, butter, sage, crispy pancetta, and just a bit of pesto. Very good. Non-miraculous. Can't say I've ever had much better, though.

Ravioli. The photo seems blah, but, hey, ravioli are ravioli - at least visually. Ingestion's another story. These were not just puffy and tender, but the platonic forms of puffy tenderness. So many top restaurants use Borgatti's or Cassinelli's, and I love both, but I've been eating them for years. These, however, are from-scratch, and better than either. Nothing tricky, no clever moves. These are honest ravioli, befitting their dowdy appearance. Homely classic ravioli to delight a jaded palate.


“What's for dinner?” I asked my stricken tablemates. They weren't responsive, so I took off for home, stopping at a kinda/sorta Persian grocery in Great Neck called "Shop Delight" purported to sell saffron cookies, one of my holy grails (I first tasted them in Toronto, and Toronto Star food editor Jennifer Bain subsequently posted this recipe). Shop Delight sells a commercialized, packaged version, with no discernible saffron, but still pretty good. 

Many thanks to Paul, Abby, and Mother-of-Abby!