Eating At Eyval: Persian Cuisine Worth the Wait
By Ian MacAllen on Monday, August 5th, 2024 at 10:23 am
I recently celebrated my [redacted] birthday. As it turns out, my wife’s birthday is a few days before mine. We celebrated with a dinner party, but my birthday has largely been eclipsed by hers since we started dating. With her party for on a Friday night, and we sent our toddler to New Jersey for a long weekend with Grandma and Grandpa. He splashed in the kiddie pool and ate ice cream, we partied like people half our age.
After a long day recovering from her birthday party, we finally decided to get ourselves together for dinner. I’ve had good luck eating at popular restaurants in the city during the summer months. Tourists don’t always know what’s in, especially if it was last season’s darling, and by July everyone else has fled to cooler destinations. I suggested we try our luck at Eyval, a Persian restaurant celebrating Iranian cuisine.
I had been watching the spot where Eyval eventually opened for a while. The corner space, just down the street from Roberta’s, had once been home to Tutu’s, a not particularly noteworthy bar that I frequented during the final seasons of Mad Men, where they hosted viewing parties. There was also the occasional Tiki-themed disco party in the basement, but neither was enough to save the restaurant. When Tutu’s closed, a Belgium themed interloper, Benelux, opened around 2018. It was expensive and like Belgian cuisine, sort of mid. (There’s nothing wrong with Belgian cuisine, but Brussels is the Washington D.C. of Europe. Paris is ninety minutes away. If you want to eat, take the train.)
The space sat vacant for a bit, and the pandemic’s impact on restaurants didn’t help. Then suddenly the back room fronting on Varet Street had come to life as Sofreh Cafe. Sofre Cafe opened in October of 2021, a collaborative offshoot of Sofreh, a Prospect Heights Persian restaurant that helped unlock the cuisine among trendsetters in New York City. Ali Sabor, an early Sofreh hire, teamed up with the founder, Nasim Alikhani, to open the cafe.
The cafe served a lot of tea, but also sold pastries. We had a newborn at home, but my wife managed to snag a few pastries one afternoon. They were, in memory, tasty and unique relative to the other pastries available in the neighborhood. (Roberta’s takeaway bakery wasn’t really producing pastries during this time, either.) But having a newborn, pastries was about what we could handle, but we were excited to hear of Eyval’s opening six months later.
Eyval in March of 2022. The restaurant quickly racked up positive reviews.
Of particular note were the skewers, all the rage that year. All the great press meant finding a reservation was nearly impossible. Although we had enjoyed the bakery pastries, we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to fight our way into the restaurant. Two years later on a warm July Saturday, we finally felt differently.
We walked in around 8:45. We had wandered over half expecting to get turned away. As recently as this past spring, finding a reservation online was proving impossible. We had a few backup restaurants in mind. We were lucky, and snagged what may have been the last walk-in table of the night.
We were sat at an unremarkable table near the door, but it did mean overhearing every other disappointed party who came in after us looking for a table. The last seating for the restaurant is 9:45, and while a few people were added to the waitlist, almost everyone else was sent away, including one pair of women who had missed the last chance to be seated by seconds. Our table was also in close proximity to a low-rent Adrian Grenier look-alike. For a moment we wondered if it was him.
We ordered a round of cocktails. I chose a tea-inspired old fashioned. It was a fine drink, and I appreciated the hint of tea flavor. However, it cost $17. I’ve started wondering if the cocktail era is finally coming to a close. I’ve drank a lot of cocktails at a lot of different restaurants, and the gross inflation of cocktail prices in recent years has left a sour taste in my mouth. There’s a longer essay here, but for now, I’ll simply say I was happy to switch to wine.
We started with the Barbari Bread topped and whipped feta spread. The bread had sesame seeds dappled on it, and had a slight glint of salty oil. I could have eaten that bread all night long. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. We liked the pastries from the cafe.
The feta had a pretty little garden on top. The flowers and greens sprinkled different flavors into each bite of cheese. There were walnuts for texture and crunch, but what made this really work well was as a compliment to the bread.
I assume there was some intent on behalf of the chef since the bread and cheese arrived together. The feta itself retained more structure than I had expected, although whipping it meant it held together better a block of the cheese that might typically crumble.
The carrot borani followed. The menu is described as sharable, and like on-trend establishments like Rolo’s, the indication seemed as though to some degree arrived as they were ready. Nevertheless, the dishes arrived with a good pace, and with what seemed an appropriate order.
The roasted carrots arrived on a bed of saffron infused yogurt and a sweet honey sauce. My first thought is that I’ve eaten this dish before. Roasted carrots over labneh, over yogurt, over sour cream – it’s a popular carrot preparation in Brooklyn these days. My wife suggested it’s the influence of Israel-born, British chef Yotam Ottolenghi. Perhaps we simply order carrots too often. All of this is probably worth exploring in another essay.
The carrots were delicious. The tang of the yogurt played well with the honey, but maybe that was the problem. The carrots were not the star of this dish, the honey was. I was happy to crunch on the carrot, but it was spooning the remnants of honey and yogurt out of the bowl that I really remember.
Next we had the Sambuseh, triangular shaped pastries stuffed with slow cooked lamb and cabbage served alongside a neat pile of saffron yogurt topped with a sweet sauce made from pistachios. These were an absolutely standout. The filling was rich and savory, and paired along the sweet and sour yogurt, a balanced flavor in the mouth. The pastry was flaky and crisp contrasting the silky filling texture. I would absolutely order this again, and again.
The Kabob Chenjeh and mushroom Kabob arrived at the table at the same time. This choice cluttered the table a little bit, but I can understand why they were served together.
The mushroom kabob consisted of oyster mushrooms layered on a bed of tahini with peppers and pickles and onions topped with chopped sumac. This lay on a flat bread. The flavors were bright and fresh, and the mushrooms were savory and rich with umami.
At first I had forgotten that it was a meatless dish. We split it between two people, essentially but slicing it into a smaller half sized bread. But as a sharable small plate, it’s probably difficult to split with more than two or maybe three people, simply because the bread begins to lose the necessary integrity. It’s also the kind of dish I would want to wrap up as a takeaway and chow down on after a few beers.
The Kabob Chenjeh was a dish we saw arrive at the table next to us before ordering. It looked seductive with this charred meat sitting on a schmear of yogurt.
The beef and onion from the kabob were definitely tasty, well cooked with the flavor of the grill infused, but honestly not all that memorable.
We probably could have happily stopped here.
But we had already ordered the lamb shank braise. It came with a bowl of rice, which was essential for enjoying the broth the shank arrived in. The meat slipped off the bone with a spoon. The flavors were spectacular, but we were already full.
We passed on dessert, although perhaps regretfully given the tastiness of the pastry we’d previously had. Sofreh Cafe closed up about a year ago. The space has since been incorporated into the full service restaurant. A new Sofreh Cafe opened earlier this spring in Prospect Heights. Ali Saboor, focused on running Eyval, is not involved in the new location.
