Tehran Restaurant

Tehran Restaurant

5065 Boulevard de Maisonneuve West

Montreal, QC

●●●●●●☺○○○○

6 1/2 out of 10

I biked past this place for a whole summer and never went once, despite looking it up and finding it had decent reviews. It just doesn't look like much from the outside but inside it's a giant dining room. when I went for lunch it was empty. Over the course of an hour and a half only one couple came in and one man ordered take-out (both were possibly Iranian, though).

The prices are pretty good, the servings are ample, and the food is again, pretty good, so there's no reason this place shouldn't be doing well. It's got nothing on Parisa in terms of quality and taste but it's maybe more convenient located across the street from Vendome metro.

A meal starts with the noodle, spinach, mint and lentil soup. the same one that started the meal at Parisa. The mint looks soup and tastes like nothing, I can't find a piece of spinach to save my life, but the yogurt is deliciously tangy and the lentils are fresh. the fried onions on the side look strangely breaded, so add crunch until they get soggy, but don't really have any of the delicious fried onion taste I'm used to from Indian cooking.

The fried onions show up on the side of the eggplant appetizer ($6 for the appetizer, $16 for the same thing served as a main course). It's a simple purée of tomato, egg and herb. I can't find the egg, though, and it's over processed so the texture is lost. There's no smoky flavour and the tomato overwhelms (maybe canned tomatoes?). The onions are piled high on the sides of the dish because they'd taste like nothing if you mixed them in. Really it was just too tomato-y but I love eggplant so much and it really wasn't bad. It just wasn't amazing. The pita bread you ate it with was cold (refrigerated), though, and the raw onion and little plastic packages of butter that came with them at the beginning didn't really help them shine.

Then a strange thing happened. I had ordered the chicken in a tomato sauce ($14) that came with barberrie rice. Out comes this platter of rice, enough for a large family. It's completely beautiful, arrange with so much barberrie (the small, red currant-like dried fruit) in layers with basmati and saffron rice. Then a second plate with this enormous chicken breast, again, enough for a large family. I am not a large family. I think I at about 5 bites of each. Not that it wasn't good, but it was just a LOT of food and the soup had really been delicious and thick and not lemony enough, but very oily and filling with chickpeas and beans. Really I could have stopped after soup.

The chicken basically fell apart when I touched it with my fork. I was so excited! Then, somehow, it was tough!!! How does this happen? The strands were falling apart in the pool of orange but it was overly chewy. I don't understand. After leaving it in the tomato sauce in my fridge for a couple days it relaxed a little and the rigor mortis eased off, but at the restaurant I was baffled. The tomato sauce was boring and fatty since it contained the juices of the chicken. If I'd come here before the pomegranate walnut sauce at Parisa I would have liked it more. The price was amazing though since the soup comes with that giant chicken and platter of rice.

The kebabs are generally what people judge any Middle Eastern restaurant by, and these are okay. Much better than fast food. They're marinated and pretty tender, but just fine. the Jooge Sulanti is a beef and chicken skewer for $22.50 and is a giant platter of rice with one skewer on each side to save having that extra dish. There's no sauce to get in the way.  Just the chicken kebab and rice (including soup) is $18. The beef kebab had a strong aftertaste of dried garlic powder and it was too chewy, but if you like a tougher steak you will like it. It's a fair bit of meat anyway.

The chicken skewer was wonderful! It was SO tender and a little lemony and a little oily. It was very homestyle comfort food-y. the tomato on the side is to be squeezed over the rice but it isn't really charred very well, making it difficult to squeeze.

Then you get tea at the end. Traditional Iranian tea with sugar cubes on the side. Unfortunately the cubes had been sitting in the air-conditioned restaurant about 3 months too long and decided not to dissolve. How can you blame them?

So this restaurant is more casual than Parisa. It's definitely not trying to be a fancy restaurant. All the sauces are simple, the spices are simple ("soma" - a mixture of spices - is offered instead of salt, though I think it's made of mostly salt anyway). That's how the server told me it was spelled but I can't find too much info on it. Help? So come here if you want a lot of food for a small price, and get one of the chicken dishes. they also specialize in comforting stews such as Ghormeh Sabzi ($14) - a beef and vegetable stew with kidney beans and basmati and saffron rice. You'll be full for two days. On Thursday you can get the lamb shank special served with traditional fava beans and dill rice. If their chicken is any indication it'll be fall off the bones tender but you'll bizarrely have to chew it like jerky.

I want more flavours, more complexity, not just sustenance. Kind of like buying a ham and cheese sandwich at the grocery store. It'll never be more than ham and cheese, and you'll know you could have done it yourself at home for less money...but you didn't. There's the added part about this being "exotic" food that generally North Americans don't cook in their own homes. There's nothing hard about it, but come here once first, and find out what it's supposed to taste like with simple ingredients. then go to Parisa and learn how to make it gourmet. Then make it at home and go back to Parisa for special occasions and here to Tehran Restaurant when you don't have the heart too cook simple food at home and are about to buy a sandwich from the grocery store. This is much better than a sandwich from the grocery store or a kebab from Basha. I'm embarrassed to even make that comparison.

Hours: 11:30am-11:30pm, daily
Expect To Pay: $18-$30 including tax, tip and a full meal with soup
514-488-0400