As the city\u2019s bakeries have grown increasingly culturally specific, representing far-flung cuisines and styles\u2014see Librae, in the East Village, which deploys Danish techniques and Middle Eastern ingredients like za\u2019atar and black lime\u2014they have also leaned into the culinary identity of New York. Radio Bakery, a spinoff of a Ridgewood restaurant called Rolo\u2019s, sells bacon-egg-and-cheese focaccia by the slice; Elbow Bread, inspired by the Jewish history of the Lower East Side, offers a challah croissant and a buckwheat latte.<\/p>\n
Perhaps none is as specific as Dilj\u0101n. Ford\u2019s partners in the business are Ali Zaman and Mohamed Ghiasi, a pair of Afghan American restaurateurs. Zaman, who is thirty, and Ghiasi, who is twenty-eight, went to the same high school in Queens, as did their fathers, who are veterans of the local restaurant industry. In 2021, the younger Zaman and Ghiasi opened Little Flower, a halal coffee shop in Astoria, which became a beloved haunt of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who also frequents Zaman\u2019s father\u2019s restaurant, Sami\u2019s Kabab House. Ford, who lived in Astoria, was a regular at Little Flower, too, and Zaman and Ghiasi enlisted him to revamp the caf\u00e9\u2019s pastry menu, devising items such as a jalape\u00f1o-cheddar tart with halal beef bacon. When the pair decided to open Dilj\u0101n, where they planned to focus on naan-e panjayi\u2014the chewy, yeasty Afghan flatbread that they\u2019d grown up eating\u2014Ford was their first call.<\/p>\n
Dilj\u0101n, on Hicks Street, is not far from the formidable queues of L\u2019Appartement 4F, but it\u2019s even closer to a stretch of Atlantic Avenue where Lebanese and Syrian immigrants flocked in the middle of the twentieth century, after the decline of Manhattan\u2019s Little Syria. The street is dotted with time-tested Middle Eastern businesses, including the spare but inviting Yemen Caf\u00e9, with its steaming platters of slow-roasted lamb and self-serve dispenser of sweet milky tea, and the grocery store Sahadi\u2019s, which still uses take-a-number deli tickets to fill orders for dried fruit and nuts by the pound.<\/p>\n
Zaman and Ghiasi\u2014a former theatre actor and a real-estate developer, respectively\u2014have a talent for riffing on classic New York tropes. After Little Flower, they opened a halal fast-food counter called Blue Hour inside a gas station in Bushwick; the interior of Dilj\u0101n, with its crimson tiles and stainless-steel counter, is meant to evoke both the Afghan flag and the sidewalk coffee carts that their fathers used to operate. \u201cI think people just think Afghan food is, like, kabab, and it\u2019s way more than that,\u201d Zaman told me. Standing behind the counter, Ford handed me a slab of puffy, finger-pocked golden bread, its shiny surface flecked with sesame and nigella seeds, to be eaten with a pair of cream-cheese dips. One was speckled with chopped beef bacon and scallion. The other was blended with sour-cherry jam, inspired by a simple breakfast of Zaman and Ghiasi\u2019s childhoods. (Their parents would substitute Philadelphia for the clotted cream they might have had in Afghanistan.)<\/p>\n
In Afghan cuisine, naan-e panjayi is ubiquitous, as likely to appear in a breakfast spread as it is to be served with stews and roasts at dinner. Before signing on to Dilj\u0101n, Ford had never made it. He started by researching what kind of wheat grows in Afghanistan. From American mills, Ford sourced flours stone-ground from varietals similar to those most commonly found in Afghanistan and began experimenting, vetting each iteration of the bread with Zaman, Ghiasi, and their families. Zaman and Ghiasi gave notes on how wheaty they wanted it to taste (very); Sami, Zaman\u2019s father, would tell Ford if it was too thick or too salty. The rows of dimples, Ford told me, are supposed to be as straight as arrows. \u201cI\u2019m still working on that,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The dimples, and the bread\u2019s oblong shape, give it a passing resemblance to focaccia, though Ford seemed to find the comparison reductive. \u201cIt might remind me of a focaccia because I learned how to make focaccia first, but that\u2019s just part of the system we\u2019re trying to break, right?\u201d he said. \u201cThere are so many Italian and French bakeries because that\u2019s the standard, but I think there should be more people being immersed in this kind of baking.\u201d Ford hopes to distinguish Dilj\u0101n by prioritizing tradition over hype. \u201cWe won\u2019t be selling anything that we call a croissant,\u201d he said, though he acknowledged that \u201cany bakery that\u2019s doing well\u201d is selling p\u00e2tisserie. \u201cPeople just love that shit,\u201d he continued. \u201cSo what do we do? We use Afghan flavors. We didn\u2019t want to do a pistachio-rose\u201d\u2014a Middle Eastern combination that has already become a clich\u00e9 of trendy pastry. \u201cIt has to be deeper,\u201d he said, assessing a tray of laminated confections. One, shaped in a more defined crescent than that of a typical croissant, curved like the emblem of the Ottoman Empire; Ford piped it full of the pale-yellow pastry cream that gave it its name, the Saffron Shah. From a small tray of sheer pira\u2014Afghan milk fudge, made with cardamom and orange-blossom water\u2014he used a cookie cutter to extract glossy circles to fit into a Danish-like pastry, between layers of a vanilla pastry cream and diplomat cream. The texture of the finished product was delightfully riotous, shards of crisp golden crumb collapsing into the pleasingly claggy fudge and luscious custard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the city\u2019s bakeries have grown increasingly culturally specific, representing far-flung cuisines and styles\u2014see Librae, in the East…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1472,9,24,55,54,56,33614,1471],"class_list":["post-64155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-magazine","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-on-and-off-the-menu","tag-splitscreenimagerightinset"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}