I love Persian food. Have done so from when I first met my lovely friend Alidad (many, many years ago) and tasted his mother’s cooking — she is a wonderful cook. However, unless you are lucky enough to have Persian friends who will invite you to share their home-cooked food, you will not be able to appreciate how amazing and rich this cuisine is.

Most Persian restaurants only serve kebabs, and if they have khoreshts (Persian stews) on the menu, they will not be so good. What is more annoying, Persian restaurants hardly ever serve tadigh, the wonderful rice crust which you see in the picture above and which is achieved by first soaking the rice, then parboiling and draining it before letting it cook (or to be more accurate steam as there is no water in the pot) for an hour or so over a very low heat. And if they have tadigh, they may well serve it microwaved which was what I got recently at Galleria, a well-known Iranian restaurant in London. Definitely not a place I will be returning to.

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