Meet Nasim Alikhani, the James Beard-Nominated Chef Who Put Prospect Heights on the Culinary Map
Alikhani's popular restaurant Sofreh celebrates traditional Iranian cuisine
Nasim Alikhani is a powerhouse! Along with running the acclaimed Iranian restaurant Sofreh, Alikhani has raised twins, managed a successful print shop, run marathons, written a cookbook, opened a café, and cooked for the Met Gala and the White House. None of this is surprising after speaking with the tireless chef.
Sofreh was an instant hit when it debuted in Prospect Heights in 2018, though opening the eatery was a long process. “I usually do what I say. It just took me 25 years,” Alikhani says laughing. The three-time James Beard nominee for Best Chef: New York State recently took time out of her busy schedule to reflect on the experiences that have led her to become a culinary superstar.
“I’m very active. I can’t stand still. Even right now as I’m talking to you, I’m doing five other things,” she said over the telephone. Alikhani manages a team of 40 and works seven days a week, starting her days at Sofreh Café—which opened last year on Flatbush Avenue across from Sofreh—and then in the restaurant’s kitchen in the evenings.
Growing up in Isfahan, Iran, Alikhani, the eldest of three, enjoyed cooking with her mother as well as her aunts and members of her extended family. “I was very fortunate to be surrounded by all these women.” Alikhani’s mother was a “natural” and “instinctive” cook who did not “fuss around food.” She prepared simple dishes that were “spectacular,“ making “it very difficult for me to eat in other people’s places,” Alikhani says.
Her father was an army officer before starting his own insurance business. Her mother was a teacher before becoming a high school principal. “She was always very busy doing so much between having three of us, a full-time job, and making everything from scratch,” Alikhani recalls, but she always made time to answer her daughter’s cooking questions and allowed her to experiment in the kitchen. “She was patient but also very trusting…. She didn’t have the OCD I have with cooking.”
By the age of twelve, Alikhani was preparing simple dishes which her mother would proudly tell guests, “Nasim did this.” By 13, she was cooking full meals. “She saw my drive and my passion,” she says of her mother, who advised, “‘You can do anything you want in the kitchen but promise me you’ll never become a housewife.’ She always said, ‘a woman’s hands should be in her own pocket,’ so she asked me to promise her that I would always earn my money.”
Keeping her promise, Alikhani studied law at Tehran University. “I wanted to become a judge,” she says. Being a judge would allow her to “implement fairness,” she thought. “Now I’m laughing, especially with the direction our law is going right now and how our judiciary system is being manipulated. I definitely had a very idealistic image of what my future would have looked like.”
Two events brought her law career to a halt. First, a defendant in a case she was observing for a class faced the death penalty. “Right there and then I decided that law was not for me. I am so against the death penalty. I truly believe that no human being should be taking another human being’s life.” Then, “revolution happened, and the government immediately issued a statement that women cannot be judges under the existing regime,” she says. “Around that time, the government of Iran shut down all the universities in the country for two and a half years,” so Alikhani decided to study abroad.
She moved to NYC in 1983 on a student visa. She learned English at Queens College, then graduated from Hunter College with a degree in sociology.
In 1986 she met her husband who at the time was a professor at NJIT. They married in 1987 and soon after opened a print and copy shop in Manhattan. While the business was profitable, Alikhani felt unfulfilled professionally. “The business was successful financially, but my heart wasn’t in it,” she says. During the eight years the shop was in business, she “cooked a lot and traveled a lot. My husband and I were traveling, eating in all of the wonderful places in the late 80s and early 90s,” but it wasn’t enough. She started dreaming about selling the print shop and using the proceeds to open a café in the East Village, where the couple was living at the time. “I knew I had to do something that is close to my heart,” Alikhani says, but she soon became pregnant with twins and “everything went on the back-burner and I became a stay-at-home mom.”
The family moved to Greenwich Village to raise the twins. Never one to be idle, Alikhani kept busy. “When my kids were in first grade, I suddenly realized that they spent a lot of time at school, so I had to do something. I signed up for my first marathon and I went back to university.” She received a master’s degree in international affairs from The New School for Social Research. By the time her kids reached middle school, she decided to open a restaurant. “With my twins, I knew that they would both leave the house together. I knew that they would be going off to college,” she recalls, “What was I going to do with my time? Who am I going to cook for? Many of the activities I was choosing always involved my kids or their [school] programs. I started talking to my husband about opening a business. He really thought [the idea] was just going to go away at some point, but I kept persisting.”
Alikhani was 50 at the time. “I was fully aware of my situation, my age.” She realized that owning a restaurant would be physically demanding, but she was not deterred. “I made the decision that I was willing to put up with long, grueling hours. I was willing to do whatever it requires to make this dream happen. I could not give it up,” she says. She knew that not attempting to pursue her dream would be a mistake. “That regret would totally devastate me more than losing money or the restaurant not being successful,” so she set out in search of a space.