People in this business love to ask what is in fashion. Which tile, which glassware, which dish will be photographed a thousand times this season.

My answer never changes, and you will not find it in any magazine. Come in, sit down, let me pour you a glass of something good, and I will tell you where it really comes from.

Here is what I believe with my whole heart. Hospitality is not a fashion. You cannot put it on in the morning and hang it up at night. You cannot order it from a supplier, license it, or copy it from someone's feed. It is within you, or it is not. Everything I have built rests on that one sentence, and it did not come from me. It came from a kitchen in Tehran.

A Kitchen in Tehran

When I was a boy in Tehran, our door was never really closed. My mother Iran sets her table today the same way she has set it my entire life: the sofreh unrolled across the floor, warm bread and fresh sabzi at every corner, the samovar murmuring in the background like a member of the family. I would stand at the edge of her kitchen and watch the steam rise off the rice, waiting for the moment she tips the pot and the tahdig comes out golden and whole, and the whole room holds its breath.

She cooks without a single written recipe. To this day, nothing is written down. It all lives in her hands: how much saffron the rice can carry, when the tahdig is ready by sound alone, how a stew tells you it needs one more hour of patience. When I ask her for a recipe, she laughs at me. She cannot give me one, the way you cannot hand someone your handwriting.

And I remember the guests. Neighbors arriving without warning, cousins appearing at the door at ten at night, a friend of a friend passing through the city. No one ever apologized for coming, because in her home a guest does not need a reason. When someone knocks, she does not look at the clock. She looks for another tea glass.

The guest is never an interruption of the day. The guest is the point of the day. Nobody teaches you this in a seminar. You absorb it the way you absorb a language, at a table, as a child, watching the door open before the knock has even finished.

From Her Table to Mine

That table followed me my whole life. Wherever I lived, whenever friends gathered in my home and I stood over the rice the way I had watched a thousand times, something in me settled into place. Feeding people is simply how my family speaks. It was only a matter of time before I built a bigger table.

In 2015 I opened the first Shiraz in Elmsford, carrying my mother's food in my hands and her voice in my ear. I will be honest with you: those first months humbled me daily. I learned quickly that a recipe can be followed, but a welcome cannot.

In those days I called Tehran more times than I can count, and my mother never gives me measurements. She gives me questions. And behind her voice I still hear my father's, may he rest in peace. He was my best teacher, and his whole lesson fit into one question, the one he asked me all his life.

“Did you taste it yourself?

Who was at the table tonight?

Did you make sure there is enough food?”

— My Mother and My Father

It took me some time to understand that these are the only numbers that have ever mattered in this business. My mother still asks me hers. My father's question I now ask myself, every single night, and answering it is one way I keep him at the table.

The Night in 2022

Then came a night I will carry for the rest of my life. A fire took our home in Elmsford. I stood on the street and watched seven years burn: the walls, the chairs, the lighting we had chosen so slowly and so proudly, the little details guests used to photograph. Everything, in other words, that fashion is made of.

In the morning, standing in the smell of smoke, I felt something underneath the grief that surprised me. The thing I was most afraid of losing was not in the ashes. It had never been in the building at all.

It was in the cooks who called me before sunrise to ask when we start again. It was in the regulars who wrote to us like family writing to family. It was in our room in Chelsea, which kept its sofreh down and its lights on while we found our footing. And it was in Tehran, on the other end of the phone, where my mother tells me, as she has always told me, what she has always known: you can lose a house and keep a home.

What Could Not Burn

So we rebuilt in White Plains. New walls, new chairs, new light. The fashion part, we replaced.

The hospitality needed no rebuilding, because it lives in people: the server who remembers you like extra sumac on your kabab, the host who greets you like a cousin arriving from far away, the cook who tastes the ghormeh sabzi one last time not because a checklist says so, but because your dinner deserves it.

“This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.”

— Rumi

Rumi understood something no trend report ever will. Welcoming is not a technique. It is a way of being human. It is the one thing at Shiraz that has never changed and never will, whatever the fashion of the year happens to be.

The Point of the Day

So when you sit down with us, in White Plains or in Chelsea, know that the welcome you feel was not designed. It was inherited. I set your table the way my mother Iran sets hers, and I check my work with my parents' three questions. Did we taste it? Who was at the table? Is there enough food for one more?

Trends will keep passing by our windows, and we will let them pass. Inside, the table is set, the rice is steaming, and your seat is waiting with a glass of Shiraz or a hot cup of tea, whichever feels like home tonight. You are the point of the day.

And before I sign off, let me confess something. Maybe I was wrong about my own title. Maybe hospitality is a fashion after all, just a different kind: the only one that never goes out of style. My mother has worn it every day of my life. My father wore it every day of his. At Shiraz Kitchen, we intend to wear it forever.