Pars Persian

Posted by Chuck at 6/25/2008 8:23 PM
Categories: Food, Antelope Valley Restaurant Reviews
Food in the AV sucks.

Pizza is a really sketchy affair. They have poultry products they call Buffalo wings, but really don't have any wings here.

The grocery stores are all unionized, which means a total lack of quality control, job pride, and customer service.

In complete reversal of the situation in New York, the most acceptable place to shop for groceries is friggin Walmart; I have to think this is due to the union/vs quality factor, since Walmart is the only non-unionized store here, I think. Costco is also pretty good, and they tend to compensate employees better than Walmart.

Most of the restaurants are TGI Tuesdays and Olivebees, all with the same, tired menu of mostly frozen and processed items dropped in a deep fryer just before serving; fast food with alcohol and table service. And there are the sirloins they hope you buy, because the profit margin on the sirloins is good, and most suburbanites think "sirloin" means something good. It doesn't.

My favorite locally-owned place so far has been Goldfish, a sushi place. It's okay. We've taken my Mom and Dad and Kelly's Kelly there, all people who don't care much for sushi, Goldfish's specialty. They all found interesting things to eat there and seemed to like it, but finally the last time I was there, I realized that the sushi wasn't really that great, at least not the way I've learned to like sushi.

In my perfect sushi world, the rice is cold and really sticky, so sticky that all of the sushi or sushi roll comes with the rest, with nothing falling apart. Every time at Goldfish, the rice has fallen apart. Also I like my raw fish to be REALLY cold, otherwise I feel like maybe it's not a great idea to be eating some raw fish.

I'm sure this is a product of my uneducated palette, but the best sushi I've had that meets these criteria above is from grocery stores with fresh-made sushi stands. In these, the sushi is made all day, but then placed directly into a fridge, re-cooling everything after preparation. Wegmans did this really well, as they did everything else really well. The Vons on Palmdale Blvd has one that's really good, too. And I go there often enough that the woman who makes the sushi knows me by name (I suck and have forgotten her name).

So, when we want to treat ourselves, we either make out own pizza, grill a steak, or for me, I go to Vons for some sushi and a spicy tuna roll. We rarely bother going to a restaurant.

But Kelly noticed a new restaurant was due to open up in the, I don't know what the call it, the fore-plaza to the Walmart / Sams Club shopping area; the strip mall between the road and the Walmart's main parking lot.

We stalked it for a few months, then finally it opened about a month ago, so Kelly took me there yesterday for my birthday.

Well, we finally have a place to eat. It's about the size of Bangkok in Liverpool, maybe a little smaller. The owner came to our table a few times, he had no "Rock and Roll!" charisma, but was nice and very competent in his position. The menus were stylish, had been edited, and had only the whole dollar value, no decimal places!
 
The food was fabulous. Kelly had a salad with a fantastic dressing we couldn't figure out (citrus? vinegar?) with no oil, and a ground meat kebab (think gyro meat) and a tenderloin kebab combo, with a side of jasmine rice and a grilled tomato.

I had stuffed grape leaves and the rack of lamb, which was split into each steak and cooked in a tandoori oven / grill, with a side of jasmine rice and a grilled tomato.

The lamb was amazingly tender and had a complex herb flavor. The rice was perfect too.

Kelly and I have a somewhat deep personal and relationship with middle eastern food. The two semesters in college after the one that Kelly and I started dating, I had a roommate named Ismail, who was an Iraqi Kurd whose family had managed to escape Kurdistan in the early 90s and establish themselves (after spending five years in a camp in Turkey and two years in a tent in Guam) in Binghamton, NY. 

Ismail was a sweet soul, the oldest of 14 children, eternally happy and optimistic, brilliant in his civil engineering profession, dedicated to his family, and his religion, and he LOVED Kelly, meaning he loved her with me and loved that I was dating her.  

"She is not like these other girls, she is not in the clubs drinking and having all the sex."

He and I had long, late night conversations about politics, Islam, Iraq, and many other things. I learned to have so much respect for him and his family. One of my biggest regrets in life is turning down the invitation to go home with him for a weekend. It was an unusual and awesome honor that I squandered.

He went home every weekend and came back Sunday evenings with huge Tupperware containers full of flat bread, stuffed cabbage and grape leaves, baklava, and other "package foods," things rolled or stuffed into dough or leaves.

It was awesome. Kelly and I and our other two roommates, Nat and Jason, were ALWAYS in the dorm apartment Sunday evenings.

So that was 2002. Ismail graduated in 2003 and left his new home country as a US citizen, with an engineering drgree, on his own free will to support the American effort in Iraq, something he talked hours with me in support of in the year leading up to the US invasion. So he went there and became an interpreter working with the US Marines, and was killed when his convoy was ambushed as they were moving in to start the first big assault on Fallujah in the spring of 2004.
 
Ismail Zebari was a proud US citizen and patriot, a proud and devout Muslim, a proud Kurd, and a proud Iraqi patriot, and he died defending all those ideals. He was also possibly the nicest and most sincere person I've ever met.

And as sad and infuriating as his death is, he's the only person I know of who wanted the US invasion, supported it in words and action, and had a real stake in what happened. So his death should be less unsettling than some kid from Iowa who had nothing at stake in Iraq.

So the middle eastern cooking classes I've taken and Kelly's and my fascination with middle eastern cuisine spawns from our hero worship of our friend Ismail and a desire to recall the innocence of our pre-Iraq invasion dorm suite optimism and our sweet, sweet friend.

 
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