Over the last several years/visits to Paris, my wife & I have had some excellent meals with Carmenere at places well written about on this board (L’Assiette, Amarante, LeMazenay…). However, as enjoyable as they’ve been, one of our pleasures has been our mutual love for non-European food & her uncanny ability to find really good ones that I cant readily find back in NYC. So, one time we went to Fifa, a (now closed) Ivory Coast restaurant/hangout, where the owner sat down and described the dishes as we ate. And, last night, off we went to Caspian, an Iranian family restaurant that couldnt have been more welcoming. I was expecting a shabby storefront type place but it was a well lit, decorated & furnished room with nice silverware & glassware.
Carmenere was there before us (we were actually evacuated from the Metro & the line was shut down, resulting in an unintended Uber ride and a ½ hour lateness) & had a carafe of a yogurt drink with herbs that I tasted, loved and ordered my own. Ginny had a nice glass of white wine. We decided to order the mixed plate for 3 and out came a platter with an assortment of dishes that I had never had. Even the familiar looking yogurt dish was mixed with mountain garlic (?), which had been dried and reconstituted and added a different taste than the lebnah I’m familiar with from scores of non-Persian Middle Eastern places in my neighborhood. Each dish was special and plentiful and we finished them all, leaving me to wonder whether there’d be any room for mains. Even the pita-type bread was a series of thin layers, to be pulled apart and used.
Both Carmenere and Ginny ordered skewers of meat/chicken, which came with both yellow and white fluffy rice. I ordered a dish that included a quarter chicken and a ton of special rice mixed with almonds, pistachios, orange & tart small berry that I thought was dried cranberry but was corrected by Carmenere - it was (do I have this right?) “barberry” (not bayberry)? A very fragrant mix that was addictive. Seeing both Ginny & I struggling to make a dent in our dishes, the owner offered to pack it up so we would have a full lunch. Ahh, the advantage of renting an apartment and not staying in a hotel. Dessert and tea followed. Total bill for 3 of us was 156euros & this would’ve been a steal at a much higher cost.
Ginny is suffering from allergies which have her throat sore. Without much of a voice to keep up with me & Carmenere (we’re talkative folk), she decided to take some photos of the mains (alas, none of the entrees - I think their website has some). Let’s see if I can download them here:
I am constantly surprised by the range of cuisine in Paris and how often one encounters completely unfamiliar ingredients. I ate “wild asparagus” with my excellent turbot last night at Le Mazenay. I thought I would be looking at some variation of the green or white stalks that are ubiquitous this time of year, but not at all. I ran into a French friend at the market this morning, and when I mentioned this to him, he knew exactly what I had eaten: “Oh, yes, the really little asparagus.” Yes! They were like tiny stalks about the thickness of parsley stems with a little asparagus head on top. I took this picture off the internet, as I didn’t think to snap a picture last night:
They were delicious, as your meal sounds to have been last night! Thanks for posting.
It is quite a rare delight to find real wild asparagus, particularly in Paris, where I’ve never seen them before. But then again you can count on Denis from Le Mazenay to put his hands on the most distinctive, rare products.
“Real” wild asparagus for that’s exactly what it is, from the true Asparagus acutifolius plant, which grows only in the wild and only near the Mediterranean. You can only forage them in Provence, the Comté de Nice, and Languedoc. As I said, they’re never seen in Paris, as a rule, but some other plants of the Liliaceae group (therefore not related to asparagus at all), bearing fat, grainy heads on a thin smooth stalk, are also called “wild asparagus” but they’re in fact muscari, related to wild onion and ramps. True wild asparagus are delicious, and I used to gather them in the countryside with my schoolmates in the Nice hinterland. Children like us generally picked them as a treat for their parents, when the asparagus were not simply eaten raw, on the spot, because they were so tasty. Whenever there had been a fire on some piece of wild land, we’d wait a few days and then go together to pick the asparagus, for the fire had fertilized the land, or perhaps burning the plant gave more food to the young shoots, and we found some much larger asparagus. These were absolute treats.
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Ginny’s pictures are very good and a truthful account of our dinner. So sorry she wasn’t feeling well last night.
Caspian is a place I found a few weeks ago, when I had come to the Charles-Michels neighborhood craving for Persian food after a hard day’s work. My natural choice when I’m very hungry is to go to a non-French restaurant (Vietnamese, Chinese, Iranian, Korean, Lebanese, North or Subsaharan African, etc.) for traditional cuisines are the only things that will satisfy my hunger. The Charles Michels-Beaugrenelle area in the 15th is the Iranian neighborhood in Paris, which can be explained by history: in 1979 and the early 80s, after the Iranian revolution, many people of the Iranian upper classes took refuge in Paris, and at that time the big high-rise building compound in the Northern 15th, called “Le Front de Seine”, was almost complete, some buildings still under construction. So the Iranian refugees bought apartments there. It is pretty much the same phenomenon with the Southeast Asian boat people finding refuge after 1976 in the newly-built Les Olympiades area in the 13th, with many brutalist high-rises where Parisians were reluctant to live. That’s how this entire triangle between Place d’Italie to the North, Porte d’Italie and Porte de Vitry to the South became “Chinatown”, improperly named since most of the newcomers were from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Some of them of course belonging to the Cantonese or Teochew diaspora.
I first headed towards Mazeh, a well-known Persian grillhouse that’s been on rue des Entrepreneurs for ages, and found it packed (mostly with non-Persian Parisians). Being very hungry I decided that this newish-looking Iranian restaurant a few steps from Mazeh would be the plan B. I was very happily surprised with the quality of my meal.
As we noticed last night, the freshness of ingredients is remarkable. We literally pigged out on the assorted appetizers, which were served in large quantities. The wild mountain garlic in the yogurt dip really made a difference. Two eggplant dishes, one with tomato and curd cheese, the other one with caramelized onions, both delicious with a slight preference for the first one; and a classic Salad Olivier, pretty much like a Russian salad: mayo, potatoes, chicken breast and other vegetables. All very delicious.
I really enjoyed my saffron-marinated grilled cornish game hen (joujeh kebab) with very fluffy white rice topped with saffron rice, but Steve’s mountain of rice topped with that mix of almonds, grated carrots, pistachios and zereshk (yes they’re barberries, épine-vinette in French) was absolutely irresistible and I must say I dug my fork into his plate more than once.
I think this place is really a rare find, since I have increasing difficulty in finding decent non-European food in Paris. Lebanese is no longer what it used to be (exception: Les Mots et le Ciel, in the 15th), Vietnamese food is improving after having gone downhill for years (there’s a social explanation for that, but let’s not stray from the topic), and unfortunately my favorite Subsaharan African restaurants have all closed, God knows why.
Incidentally, Fifa (which you mentioned) was Beninese, not Ivoirian. This one was my very favorite but it closed because Blaise, the chef-owner, simply retired. I have been looking for other Beninese or Togolese restaurants (IMO the best cuisines in that region of the world), but they seem to have all recently closed, and my search is still going on.
Thanks @Carmenere. I knew these must be something special, as I could not Google them in English, “wild asparagus,” but finally had to resort to the French “asperge sauvage.” The English search returned only how to find the asparagus I am familiar with in the wild.
Looks lovely.
Though I chuckled because you ate Zereshk / Barberry Polo with chicken when we went to Nasrin’s Kitchen too, lol.
I completely forgot about that place and dinner. Thanks.
From the photo it also looks like you had tahdig, the crunchy layer of rice from the bottom of the rice pot.
The idea is that you would need to order it in advance off-menu since it’s in limited supply or is reserved for certain customers.
But nowadays restaurants will expressly make it alone and so you can sometimes find it on menus. I’ve had it both ways. I think it’s better the original way, but that could be psychological.
It is also traditional to order a raw egg which you can mix into the rice at the table. But I’ve never seen that on a menu.
Its on their menu as tadig &, yes, we ordered it as a side. No egg. Scroll down to the end.
https://www.thefork.com/restaurant/restaurant-caspian-r812688/menu
You speak of the good- tadig! We often eat at Mazeh. Trying to recall the grocery very close, I thought it is Eskand. Mazeh does a great zereshk polo, I keep gheymeh in my freezer for emergencies. If you have a good Paris Persian bread source, let me know please.
Your screen name is ‘pickles’ in Farsi… more than coincidence?
Judging by the shape and size of the tahdig, I think they make it in small separate pans so that they can serve it individually. You can see it on the lower right of Steve’s second picture.
Their tahdig is very good, crispy but not hard.
