Turquoise Persian Grill opens in Roslyn Heights

When Kayvan Nikoufekr conceived his new Persian restaurant in Roslyn Heights, he wanted to showcase the authentic flavors of his native Iran, "with recipes as close to original as could be." To that end, he hired a chef from Tehran, Assad Zadh, who had never cooked in America before and gave him free rein.

It didn’t escape Nikoufekr and his partner, Ali Molavi, that there could hardly be a better time to open a Persian eatery in Roslyn Heights: Ravagh Persian Grill, the perennial Newsday top restaurant about a mile away, has been undergoing a massive renovation since last year. (Here’s a welcome update: Ravagh owner Masoud Tehrani hopes to reopen in February; we’ll keep you posted.)

Certainly the menus at both places have a lot in common with starters such as Shirazi salad and kashke badmejan (eggplant with dried whey); stewed dishes like gormeh sabzi (braised beef with kidney beans) and fesenjoon (chicken with walnuts and pomegranates); a panoply of kebabs, from joojeh (bone-in Cornish hen) and koobideh (minced lamb and veal) to shishleek (chunks of lamb) and barg (beef tenderloin). Kebabs can also be ordered in various combinations that culminate in the darbari combo: two skewers of koobideh, one jujeh, one barg and five lamb chops.

Turquoise serves one kebab I’ve never seen on Long Island: Negini starts out with a traditional koobideh mixture, but the minced meat is interspersed with cabochons of chicken breast. Nikoufekr explained that in Farsi, the Persian language, " ‘negini’ means ‘stone,’ like in a piece of jewelry." Another new one on me was tachin, a baked rice dish, the tender, saffron-hued grains bound together by egg and yogurt and garnished with nuts and barberries.

Virtually every dish here comes with a big pile of perfectly cooked basmati rice polo (pilaf). But you can also order sabzi polo, tinted green with cilantro and dill; zereshk polo, sweet and sour with barberries; sour-cherry albaloo polo or shirin polo, studded with candied carrots, nuts and orange zest.

And don’t miss the tahdig. Most rice-centric cultures have a special reverence for the crisp, scorched rice that adheres to the bottom of the rice-cooking pot, from socarrat in Spain to nurunji in Korea to guoba in China. The Persian contribution to this repertoire is tahdig, served at Turquoise either plain or with your choice of stew.

The dessert menu includes homemade bastani, saffron-tinted, rosewater-scented ice cream, and an excellent all-pistachio baklava that is not drowned in syrup and has the crispness to show for it. There’s also a full bar with craft cocktails. Starters range from $10 to $17, mains from $27 to $40.

"Turquoise" is a name more often identified with Turkish restaurants than with Persian ones. (Blame it on the semiprecious stone which was brought to Europe from Turkey and which the French called turquoise — literally, "from Turkey.") Nikoufekr chose this name for his restaurant because, he said, "it’s the official Persian color. Look at any official portraits of Pahlavi [the ousted Shah of Iran who died in 1980] and his family — they are always wearing turquoise, or ‘firozi’ in Farsi."

There’s a lot of turquoise / firozi in the spare, modern dining room here, as well as a good bit of paisley, an ornamental design that originated in Persia.

Turquoise Persian Grill, 36 Lincoln Ave., Roslyn Heights, 516-277-1950, turquoisepersiangrillnbar.com. Open noon to 10 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday, closed on Monday.