The story below is from our January/February 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
A1 Afghan Restaurant & Grocery’s juicy kebabs, ethereal eggplant and fragrant rice dishes offer transportive tastes and homey hospitality on Williamson Road.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
Owner Hussain Ghanizada outside his Williamson Road eatery and grocery store.
It’s a Wednesday morning and the early November sun shines brightly, as if spotlighting A1 Afghan Restaurant & Grocery’s location on a stretch of Williamson Road that’s home to several other immigrant-owned markets and restaurants. The sunshine is not the only source of warmth; as soon as I walk in for my interview, owner Hussain Ghanizada invites me to sit in one of the restaurant’s booths and shortly after, an employee pours us steaming cups of black tea. Soma Ghafoozada, Ghanizada’s wife, comes over to say hello and serves us an impressive array of Afghan sweets including jalebi, syrupy-sweet fried dough spirals and awb e dundawn, crumbly pistachio cookies that dissolve in my mouth like a poof of magic.
I had been to A1 Afghan Restaurant and Grocery once before to meet Ghanizada and sample superlative lamb kebabs, grilled to juicy-tender perfection on the patio’s small charcoal grill and an ethereal plate of steamed eggplant drizzled with homemade garlic yogurt and sprinkled with dried mint that I’m still thinking about. I’m not the only one smitten by the food and sincere service: Ghanizada says they received close to 1,000 unique customers in the restaurant’s first two months of operation, including members of the Afghan community looking for a taste of home, Indian and Pakistani groups gathering for weekly family dinners and curious foodies of all stripes. It is immigrant-owned restaurants like A1 Afghan Restaurant & Grocery whose hospitality and food manage to make diners, no matter where they’re from, feel at once truly transported and more deeply connected to their community.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
On weekends, the restaurant is a full house, with diners spilling onto the patio in warmer months.
Ghanizada opened A1 Afghan’s grocery portion in March 2024, and the restaurant followed that July, giving him time to renovate the space (previously home to Legends Sports Bar) and develop a menu. Ghanizada, who also owns A1 Car Sales, took advantage of travelling to car auctions to try different Afghan restaurants in the region. “Everywhere I was going, there the name was Afghan restaurant but the food was not real Afghan food. It wasn’t bad, but what it’s supposed to be I never had those tastes of Afghanistan,” he says.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
Tender lamb kebabs and steamed eggplant are standout dishes at A1 Afghan.
Comparing those notes against his memories of preparing Afghan food with his twin brother for large family gatherings and drawing from family recipes allowed Ghanizada and Ghafoozada to devise a menu of three dozen dishes spanning breakfast, lunch and dinner. Some of the most popular Afghan dishes that made the cut include two kinds of steamed dumplings, ashak, filled with leeks, and manto, stuffed with ground beef, both topped with garlic yogurt, split chickpea sauce and cilantro, as well as bulani, flaky breads that eat like a cross between scallion pancakes and a savory turnover. The bulani are stuffed with either leeks (gandana) or potatoes (kachalo) and are served with a lightly spicy chutney for dipping. “These are very common,” Ghanizada says of the bulani. “A lot of people, if they eat them one time they order them every time.” Another signature is Qabl E Palow, basmati rice cooked with caramelized onions, carrots, almonds and lamb, which Ghanizada describes as Afghanistan’s most famous dish.
These dishes not only ring true to Ghanizada’s definition of authentic Afghan cuisine, but they have also struck a chord with the Afghan community. “Our Afghan community, when they came here and they had the food and they were amazing, all of them,” he says. “Most of them they grew up in the United States and they’ve never been in Afghanistan. When they taste the food they were like ‘Oh my god, what is this? What did you add to it?’ I said, ‘Nothing, we use our magic, nothing else.’”
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Layla Khoury-Hanold
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Layla Khoury-Hanold
Since Afghanistan is bordered by Pakistan and Iran, and some Afghan provinces’ culinary preparations overlap with Indian cuisine, several of A1 Afghan’s menu items have cross-cultural appeal, too. There are Iranian specialties such as korma sabzi, a dish of stewed spinach, and Zereshk Polow, steamed basmati rice scented with saffron and studded with barberries, served with chicken. Lamb or chicken dishes such as biryani, a mixed rice dish, and karai, redolent of garlic, ginger, green chili and coriander, have proved especially popular among the Indian and Pakistani communities. “Every weekend you come, you will see most are Indian and Pakistani.[…] They are saying that ‘Oh my god, this is the best biryani or karai that we ever had. Even though the foods are from their country originally but [it’s] the way we make it.”
Layla Khoury-Hanold
I first learned about A1 Afghan Restaurant & Grocery via Local Colors’ Instagram. Local Colors is a non-profit that “celebrates international diversity and fosters the values of inclusion, equity and multicultural understanding,” which it accomplishes in part by hosting multi-cultural events such as its annual namesake festival, Lunar New Year and Nowruz, or Persian New Year, an important spring event for the Afghan and Iranian community.
Local Colors’ Executive Director, Lisa Spencer, has a particular affinity for international cuisine and views posting photos of new restaurants and their owners on social media as another way of giving a platform to people of diverse backgrounds. “I think food is a gateway to cultural exploration and to me, it’s being able to take the different flavors, the different styles of eating, and it really gives you a taste, figuratively and literally, of what that culture is about,” Spencer says.
Restaurants like A1 Afghan Restaurant & Grocery also help to paint a more nuanced portrait of what our community looks like. “You get a taste of the diversity that’s in the area by the kinds of restaurants that we have,” Spencer says. “It’s so important to support the different ethnic restaurants that are here because it really shows the broader public who’s here, and also the fact that they’re contributing to the economy.”
Layla Khoury-Hanold
Regardless of provenance or recipe, A1 Afghan’s food is also objectively delicious in its execution, seasoning and balance of flavors and textures. Afghan food, as Ghanizada explains, is not spicy by nature so it appeals to a wide variety of palettes; he’s quick to cite the 100 5-star Google reviews garnered in the restaurant’s four months of operation. “Everything I do, I do it starting with the love. You know, if you do anything with love you can do it in the best way,” he says, adding, “Right now, the important thing for me is when people are happy from us and from our food.”
The story above is from our January/February 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!