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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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The story above is a preview from our January/February 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!