Childhood in Iran shaped chef’s cooking in the pandemic
New York Times
A FOREST IN THE BAY AREA, CALIF.
Moments after walking into a verdant forest in San Francisco’s East Bay, chef Hanif Sadr nibbled on the vegetation he found there — canary yellow mustard flowers, then spicy wild radish flowers, streaked with white and purple. He tasted potently cool chocolate mint and sniffed leaves from an intensely aromatic
California bay laurel.
He grabbed a stalk of wild wheat and threaded foraged blackberries onto it like a skewer, a trick he learned as a child in the ’80s in Northern Iran. “I’d have stalks as tall as me, full of berries,” he said.
Back then, Sadr would wander the forest surrounding his family’s walnut and hazelnut farm in the Alborz mountain range, occasionally picking the blackberries for his grandmother’s jam or wild herbs for her tea.
Sadr, the chef and majority owner of Komaaj, a pop-up restaurant and catering company in Berkeley, California, first discovered these treasures in the summer of 2013, a little more than a year after arriving in the United States. He has been foraging there ever since. (There is a robust foraging community in the Bay Area, despite the practice being banned on public and private land.)
That summer, he worked as a camp counselor for a Persian language-immersion and nature school in El Cerrito, leading children on hikes throughout the East Bay. There, he found many of the same plants he foraged in Iran, like Persian hogweed (golpar in Farsi), which his grandmother would brew into pain-relieving tea when he was sick.
“Finding Persian hogweed was a turning point for me,” he said. “It helped me feel more at home here.”
Earlier this year, before the pandemic, Sadr was set to open three new projects: Calabash, a food hall in Oakland, with chefs Azalina Eusope and Nigel Jones;
Komaaj Kitchen at the Laundry, an event and gallery space in San Francisco; and a cafe at another event space in Menlo Park. The first two were delayed, and the last opportunity is gone. To keep Komaaj afloat during the pandemic, he began making a weekly family-style meal in his catering kitchen.
Sadr said that in a time of crisis, it’s common in Iran to gather and preserve as much food as possible.
“You cannot imagine what our mothers and grandmothers used to do during the war to preserve food, because at any moment things could run out,” he said. And so when the pandemic hit, he focused on preservation. He started Komaaj Preservation Lab, a project in which he preserves foods that are foraged or donated by locals with abundant gardens.
He uses traditional techniques for drying and blending tea, fermenting pickles and making jams with Iranian fruits and flowers, like orange blossom or borage. This helps him cut down food cost for the weekly meals he makes at Komaaj, keeps his employees working and gives him products to sell online and at Komaaj Kitchen at the Laundry when it opens.
“Focusing on nature, touching the ingredients,” Sadr said. “It helps me feel better, in the moment and not thinking about the future.”