The story didn't begin here. It began in 2015, a few miles away in Elmsford — the first Shiraz Kitchen, where my mother Iran's Tehran recipes first met the public. The next year, the New York Times came, ran the headline "A Persian Renaissance at Shiraz Kitchen," and called us Very Good. We added the wine bar in 2018. Three straight MICHELIN Bib Gourmands followed — 2020, 2021, 2022. And then, in 2022, a fire took the Elmsford room. The doors we'd opened with everything we had closed, not by choice.

We could have ended there. Instead we rebuilt — here, in the heart of White Plains, on Mamaroneck Avenue. Same recipes. Same welcome. The same standard my mother set in a kitchen in Tehran, carried through the hardest year we'd known and set back down, plate by plate, in a room we're prouder of than ever.

My mother's name is Iran, like the country, and she never writes her recipes down. She cooks by instinct, the way you only can after feeding people your whole life — fifty guests without ever looking overwhelmed, because to her, feeding people was never work. It was love made visible. That is the standard I refused to let a fire take. As I said when we lost Elmsford: fire can destroy buildings; it cannot destroy recipes that live in your blood.

So when you sit at this table, you're sitting at a comeback. The bright, sun-kissed flavors of the Mediterranean and the deep, soulful traditions of Persian cooking — set down with the same care we'd give our own family. From your first sip of wine to the last shared bite, White Plains is more than a restaurant. It's proof that the welcome survived.

— Reza Parhizkaran