R MAMAN ZARI 4639 N. Kedzie

773 -961-7866 mamanzari.com

As they were looking for spaces, they pivoted when they found and fell in love with the Kedzie Avenue spot, former home to Semiramis and Lebanon Bites. Suddenly a Persian ghost kitchen operating in the shadow of Noon-O-Kabab and Kabobi didn’t seem like such a great idea.

Plus they wanted to introduce guests to a broader sweep of Persian food and feature uncommon, seasonally appropriate dishes.

“We could’ve done a la carte,” says Shahsavarani. But you’re not necessarily going to get people to try new things. “With a tasting, you’re kind of forcing people to step outside of their comfort zone once they decide they’re going to eat here. We already had an array of recipes to choose from. We started narrowing them down, like, ‘Which of these is attractive?’ And which of these are not being done around here? Which of these flavors can Matteo take and do something fun with?’”

Austin, Texas, chef Amir Hajimaleki has hosted a few Persian tasting menu pop-ups in recent years, ahead of a planned brickand-mortar. In London, chef Yuma Hashemi recently remade his French dominant Drunken Butler into the multicourse modern Tehran_ Berlin, but as far as I can tell, that’s Maman Zari’s only competition in the prix fixe space.

I booked a ticket for one of Maman Zari’s soft opening seatings. That’s something I wouldn’t do if this were a critical restaurant review. And I want to leave out some of the surprises, but I can say it’s one of the most interesting, engaging, and least tedious multicourse meals I’ve eaten my way through.

It starts with a small, crispy, frittata-like potato-egg cake called kuku sibzamani, usually something one would eat in a sandwich, but here it’s plated with thin, pickled cucumber and a dollop of the northern Iranian herbal condiment known as dalar. The mirza ghase- mi comes with a shared plate of mixed micro herbs, a delicate approximation of sabzi khordan, the mountain of fresh herbs that typically accompanies traditional Persian meals. A single lamb chop with a swipe of tomato sauce and a molded dome of sa ron rice is an easy, late-course reference to the meaty mountains of rice that fill the seats up the street.

Lo Bianco employs a few by-now-familiar modernist tricks to set some of these dishes apart. The watermelon on the salad course is vacuum compressed to give it the appearance of fresh, raw tuna. There’s a clear, jiggly, spherified blob of sweet lime juice that sits atop the rosewater rice noodle sorbet, faloodeh. The tahdig chips are simply made by pureeing saffron-stained basmati rice and spreading it to dehydrate and break into shatteringly snackable crisps.

Shahsavarani says that though Iran is hardly a dry country, it was still a challenge to develop wine pairings that weren’t entirely dependent on the whites that go better with the inherent sweetness and herbaceousness of Persian cuisine. Still, she found a few reds for the later courses, including a couple of Italian bottles, in honor of Lo Bianco. There’s also a small cocktail list with drinks named for Iranian cities, including the Gonabad Gin, a bewitching, golden-stirred mix of sa ron gin and poppy-infused amaro.

Relative to other upscale tasting menus around town, Maman Zari is a steal: $85 for eight courses, $45 for the wine pairing. It passes like a breeze too, in about two and a half hours under Farideh Shahsavarani’s abstract acrylic paintings, all of which makes me plenty interested in stepping outside my Persian food comfort zone for the future fall, winter, and spring menus.

@MikeSula