Our group of five arrived around dinnertime at Saffron Kabab Restaurant’s Bank Street location, just as the smell of marinated meats being grilled began to waft from the kitchen.

For this outing the Eat the Strip team was joined by three friends, including Jennifer Heagle, one of the original founders of Red Apron, a local food store that sells prepared meals with an emphasis on locally sourced ingredients. (Fun fact: Yours truly worked as a dishwasher there many, many years ago as a university student.)

Opened in 2019, Saffron Kabab Restaurant is a family-run restaurant with a second location on Carling Avenue. Saber, its affable owner, came by to check on everyone over the course of our meal and handed us lots of candies to take home afterwards. He told us how everything right down to the cutlery being used at the restaurant was selected with quality and purpose in mind. Sure enough, the spoons we were using, he pointed out, were engraved with an image of Cyrus the Great, the founder of Persian empire. Paintings depicting other Persian icons adorn the wooden walls, as tables begin to fill up with chattering friends and families.

Our meal begins with a serving of a complimentary fruit platter. As we were quite peckish this was quite welcome, and a nice way to whet our appetite. We ordered an assortment of classic Persian dishes, including a platter of chicken and beef kebabs, and fesenjoon, an iconic dish that I seek almost every time we eat Persian food.

The platter came with lentil soup, which is not dissimilar to an Indian daal, albeit not spicy. This holds true in fact for a lot of Persian and Afghan cooking, where many of the dishes resemble North Indian cuisine but are served using much milder spices. I enjoy this from time to time, being able to appreciate the complex flavours of milder ingredients that can sometimes get eclipsed by the heat of chillies and peppers used in South Asian cooking. Along with our meal, we ordered some hummus and kashk bademjan. The latter is made from deep fried mashed eggplants, sauteed onions, garlic, and mint. It had the consistency of pesto. It was creamy, nutty, and paired well with some fresh bread.

Our meat platter was served with a generous portion of saffron-infused rice. While the other kebabs were tasty, my go-to platter item were the chicken drumsticks. I had seen Saber grilling them in the back and knew right away to try them when the platter arrived. You could tell they had been marinated for a long time, perhaps in a yogurt-based marinade. It imparted a smoky, tandoor flavour to the rice. I found myself dipping it in hummus and garlic sauce and going back for several rounds.

You could tell the focus at the restaurant is on authenticity.

“At Saffron, we take pride in providing a traditional Persian cuisine by using a blend of local ingredients and imported spices only grown in our homeland, bringing together a symphony of vibrant and authentic flavours in all our dishes,” reads the restaurant’s website.

We decided to split the bill in half. Our total, with a tip, came to $67. While it may be a tad steep compared to our usual strip mall gems, we had plenty of leftovers and some very happy bellies to show for it.