Maman Zari has the only fine-dining Persian tasting menu in the country

Check out what a former flight attendant and an Italian chef have in mind for the future of this ancient cuisine.

By MIKE SULA

Last November, chef Matteo Lo Bianco took a crash course in Persian food.

Each day he’d show up at Farzad Shahsavarani’s house and begin cooking under the eye of his former boss, and his sister Farideh.

They made all the classics: the intensely herbaceous lamb and bean stew, ghormeh sabzi; the fruity egg-stu ed meatballs, kofte Tabrizi; the yogurt-enriched, legume and noodle soup, ash reshteh; the smoky eggplant-tomato dip, mirza ghasemi; and a lot more.

“They felt he had the flavors down immediately,” says Mariam Shahsavarani, Lo Bianco’s business partner and Farzad’s daughter. “But they felt he was truly there when he started making things his own. There was a moment when he was making ghormeh sabzi and sauteeing the herbs, and he commented about how he understood their importance. He made mirza ghasemi for them for the first time and suggested they double smoke it, and then later developed the tahdig chips to go with it.”

Lo Bianco is a Milan-born chef and veteran of some half-dozen Italian restaurants around town (Coco Pazzo, Volare, Francesca’s, Rosebud). Shahsavarani is a former flight attendant who, by her own admission, doesn’t belong anywhere near a professional kitchen. But together they’ve opened Maman Zari, the first and only seasonal fine-dining, prix fixe Persian restaurant in the country.

They officially open on Thursday with an eight-course tasting menu of reimagined dishes—with wine pairings—on a stretch of Kedzie Avenue in Albany Park that’s also home to two of the city’s most established and beloved Persian restaurants.

But you won’t find anything like Lo Bianco’s compressed watermelon salad with bal- samic pearls on the menu at Kabobi, nor his double-smoked mirza ghasemi, served with crunchy sa ron-tinted rice chips that mimic tahdig, the crispy bottom-of-the-pot layer of basmati rice that every Persian family fights over. Noon-O-Kabab’s menu sprawls, but you won’t find any deep cuts like Lo Bianco’s abdoogh khiar, a chilled yogurt soup with cucumber, walnuts, and raisins; or his mahi sefid, a sa ron-battered, gently pan-fried branzino filet, served with smoked dill-parsley-cilantro-flecked rice and sa ron beurre blanc.

Shahsavarani may not think much of her own kitchen skills, but she does have an extensive knowledge of Persian food, history, and language that she developed beginning at the age of four on her first visit to Iran to visit her grandparents during the Nowruz (Persian New Year) celebrations. She and her grandparents, who lived part of the time on a fruit orchard in the north of the country near the Caspian Sea, traded visits all through her childhood, teens, and early adulthood. In her 20s, she lived in Iran for nine months, studying Farsi and traveling all over the country.

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“My family bonds over food,” she says. “You don’t have a gathering without oodles and oodles of food. Anytime someone stops by for ten minutes, it’s like, ‘Let’s cut up some fruit and have a cup of tea.’ My ca eine tolerance got really good when I lived there.”

In the summer, her grandparents escaped the Tehran heat and moved into the apartment above the Shahsavaranis’ Noble Square catering company. “I’d have lunch with them,” she says. “My grandfather and I would hop on the Grand bus and go to the Children’s Museum or Navy Pier or just wander around. There was usually candy involved for me. Then we’d come back and he and my grandmother would make us dinner.”

Shahsavarani first met Lo Bianco when she was a teenager and he took a job in the family business, which had transitioned into a privatelabel food manufacturer, that once filled the deli cases at Jewel. She knew him as a chef whose versatility extended far beyond highend Italian food.

Shahsavarani worked as a flight attendant for the travel perks, but mainly so she could get time off to visit her grandparents. After they passed away last year, she’d begun looking for something new. “I always wanted a casual cafe,” she says. “I like hospitality, which I guess a flight attendant is in line with.”

Her father suggested they join forces with Lo Bianco and open a dual Persian-Italian ghost kitchen, and the chef’s training began under the eye of her aunt Farideh, a skilled home cook and celebrated visual artist on an extended visit from Tehran.

“I fell in love with the food,” says Lo Bianco. “The family helped me a lot. Every day they teach me more and more. All the spices. How to use the sa ron. How to cook the eggplants.”

Lo Bianco became intimate with the importance of an abundance of fresh herbs—he uses nearly a dozen on the menu, including dill, parsley, cilantro, mint, tarragon, and fenugreek. Rice plays a critical role as well. It appears in four di erent dishes on the tasting menu—five if you count the rice noodles in the dessert sorbet.