Berenjak

Grill heat before rice

The bread and kabab sit close to the fire; Kian Samyani, chef at Berenjak in Soho, London, builds the meal around that nearness. His Persian cooking starts with family recipes, childhood visits to Iran, and the shared table, then passes through the pressure of service. At Berenjak, founded in 2018, Samyani made the choice that still gives the restaurant its centre of gravity: kebab and bread before the more familiar kebab-and-rice pairing. That shift changes the hands at the table. Guests tear, pass, fold, dip, and return to the grill. Samyani worked earlier as a development chef at Brigadiers, where fire, texture, flavour, and timing had to meet the pace of a full room. He did not leave memory behind when he came to this station. He sharpened it. The food here carries Tehran street eating, family gatherings, and professional control in the same service, with heritage treated as working material rather than display.

Kabab, mazeh, and the working flame

The program is built on charcoal-grilled kababs and mazeh, with small plates moving beside bread, dips, salads, pickles, and grilled meat. The house signatures name the frame plainly: hummus, koobideh kabab, and mirza ghasemi. Samyani also works from a broader Persian register, with dishes such as chelow kabab chenjeh, baghali polow ba mahiche, and zereshk pollow marking the range between grill, rice, richness, and brightness. At the pass, the craft is not novelty. It is repetition under heat. Koobideh asks for tenderness and grip; bread asks to arrive while it still carries warmth; mazeh asks for enough acidity and seasoning to keep returning to the table without tiring it. Berenjak holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and its award record stands at 5 in total, with 2 current-year awards and 3 from previous years. The numbers matter less than the discipline they point to: an à la carte restaurant where the grill must answer every service.

A narrow room with the kitchen in view

The room keeps the work close. Exposed brick, distressed plaster, snug leatherette booths, and open kitchen views give the Soho site the feel Samyani wanted from informal Iranian eating places, handled with enough polish for London service. Flame is part of the room’s texture, not a hidden process. The tandoor and mangal barbecue are visible; the counter and the pass sit inside the noise of a lively, intimate restaurant. In that setting, shared plates make practical sense. The table fills in stages, bread first or close to first, then dips, smoke, char, and the small corrections that happen between kitchen and floor. Samyani has described the emotional frame as “family and culture, past, present, and future.” At Berenjak, that sentence resolves in the koobideh kabab.