Gitijoon’s

When Giti Joon was a little girl in Iran, she would run away when her mother tried to teach her how to cook. “She was a great chef,” says Giti today. “She made everything from scratch.” (Her parents had a room full of pickles and vinegar, a huge vat of rice, and a tendency to buy and cook in such bulk that she remembers the neighbours helping to stir a massive pot of fresh tomato paste in the garden.)

Giti was married by the time she started to cook, and even then she would enlist her mother as a caterer when inviting guests around for dinner. “My friends opened the window to say thank you loudly to my mother, because she lived next door, and they knew it was her food.”

Long since resettled in Dubai, Giti now serves basically the same function for her own daughter, Ana, whose friends all talk about how great her food is. It was Ana who encouraged Giti to share her home cooking on a more regular, communal basis, knowing how much she loves to meet and feed people, showing friends and guests Iranian cuisine and culture.

“You can find Iranian food everywhere,” says Giti, “but it’s not home-made with good ingredients.” A dish called abgoosht, for example, “can only be made from experience.” It’s a rustic Persian favourite with potatoes, beans, chickpeas, and various cuts of meat, traditionally cooked very slowly over coals in a copper pot, and served in two stages.

First the rich broth, soaked up with an Iranian bread called sangak. Then the meat, mashed together with the beans. The real thing is hard to come by, and anyone who eats it at Giti Joon’s house now tends to swear by it. Her insistence on the proper ingredients, from fenugreek to Iranian basmati rice, can sometimes make them difficult to source. Accustomed to bringing many of them back with her after visits to her homeland, she’s lately had to hunt them out in specialist grocery stores around the UAE.

“I am trying to find a steady supply of the right produce in the right season, like broad beans, which are only good for one month.”

Since she started hosting a supper club, old and new friends have tended to come back for particular menu items. “Abgoosht is evergreen, and everyone likes ghormeh sabzi [a popular Persian herb stew]. And slow-roasted lamb shank with broad bean rice and dried dill. That’s very rich, very fancy. It knocks your socks off.”

As for dessert, there’s only a few options. “Culturally,” says Giti, “we are not big on sweets.” There’s a tasty, pudding-like mixture of rice and saffron with rose water, sliced nuts and cinnamon called sholeh zard. Then there’s her daughter’s favourite, halva, made with flour, oil and sugar. Tricky to make despite its relatively few ingredients, it’s also traditionally served at Iranian funerals, so Giti is a little reluctant. “My mom thinks it’s a bad omen,” says Ana.

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We attended a supper club at Giti’s about two years ago and can vouch for her abgoosht! We still talk about how undeniably comforting that hearty meat broth was.

This most recent time around her table, Giti treated us to baghali polo ba mahiche – that luxurious meal of slow-cooked lamb shanks and a mountain of aromatic broad bean and dill rice. There was also a generous amount of crispy potato tahdig (from the bottom of the rice pot) for us all to share. Giti – whose name translates to ‘the universe’ – makes food that is so clearly infused with love and her passion for Iranian cuisine is admirable. Dessert was sholeh zard – the beloved rice pudding that had all the quintessential flavours of a Persian dessert.