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It may come as a surprise to fans of Peninsula restaurant chain Zareen’s that its namesake Zareen Khan grew up initially uninterested in cooking. A picky eater whose childhood home was a block from the culinary heart of Karachi, Pakistan – and near its biggest book market – she preferred reading as a young child and dreamed of becoming a doctor.
But when Khan’s older sister married a man with a passion for cooking, it piqued her interest in cooking and later helped her recognize the labor and love behind the food that her mother, sister and aunts made.
That experience, combined with cooking classes that she took with Azra Syed, whom she calls the “matriarch of Pakistani culinary instructions,” sparked her passion for Pakistani cooking that has yielded three popular restaurants, recognition in the Michelin Guide and now a debut cookbook co-authored with her husband Umair Khan – an author, visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley, and founder of global tech services firm Folio3.
“Zareen’s Pakistani Kitchen: Recipes from a Well-Fed Childhood,” which was released March 18, comes out in the midst of Ramadan and Women’s History Month – apt timing for a book celebrating Pakistani food and women’s empowerment.
The book features popular Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi specialties and staples. Recipes include dishes that are among the favorites served at the restaurants – such as the chicken tikka masala, Desi-Paleo Salad and Memoni samosas – as well as South Asian street foods, but the cookbook is also “a food crawl down memory lane” with Zareen and Umair Khan’s favorite homemade meals from their childhoods in Pakistan.
“Zareen’s Pakistani Kitchen” is geared toward American home cooks, with the goal of making Pakistani cooking accessible without compromising authenticity. It’s divided into sections ranging from starters to side dishes, breakfast to dessert and “meaty mains” to “vegetarian delights.” In the back, menu suggestions are included for weeknight meal-planning, dinner parties, Valentine’s Day and more.
The cookbook also serves as an extension of the restaurants’ mission of supporting and empowering women, with profiles spotlighting six “remarkable women” such as Michelle Tam, food activist and creator of Nom Nom Paleo; poet, artist and author Rupi Kaur; and “The Great British Bake Off” winner chef Nadiya Hussain. Half of the earnings from cookbook sales will go to eight charities – six chosen by each of the women featured, and two picked by Zareen and Umair Khan.
Before diving into the recipes, “Zareen’s Pakistani Kitchen” shares the voices of its authors. Umair Khan takes readers on a food crawl through Karachi, describing in vivid detail a culinary trip that includes eating biryani on the beach and feasting on a seafood dinner cooked by fishermen on a boat following a nighttime search for mud crabs.
Zareen Khan’s section serves as a quick overview of how she became a professional chef through home cooking – first upon moving to the United States and experimenting with how to cook traditional Pakistani food on a married graduate student budget and without access to Pakistani groceries (“this was Boston in 1995 after all,” she quips), then later as a working mom of picky eaters.
She left work in the corporate world to spend more time with her children, then realized her “self-imposed work restriction, for someone who had always worked, was not a good idea,” she writes. She ended up hosting Pakistani cooking classes out of her home, and rave reviews prompted the start of a frozen kabab delivery business, Curry Village Foods, that served as a precursor to Zareen’s.
What began as deliveries to families out of a minivan later led to menus for Silicon Valley startups and VC firms, and in March 2014 the first Zareen’s location opened in Mountain View near the Google campus. The menu was small to start, but Zareen’s was profitable in its second month. A second, larger location opened on California Avenue in Palo Alto in late 2016, followed by an expansion to Redwood City in fall 2020.
The pandemic temporarily halted work on the Redwood City restaurant. Revenue plummeted, and they weren’t sure if the business would survive. But an unexpected source of income buoyed staff’s spirits and helped keep Zareen’s afloat: Customers started buying gift cards, many of which were returned unused.
“One loyal customer even approached me and asked if she could write out a check to me as a donation,” Zareen Khan writes. “Their love kept our staff working and our restaurant running.”
Peninsula Foodist spoke with Zareen and Umair Khan about balancing accessibility and authenticity, how they decided which restaurant recipes to include and the most nostalgic dishes in the book. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Peninsula Foodist: The book is dedicated to “the generations of mothers and grandmothers who fed us with love” and it spotlights several women that you “love and admire.” Why was it important to make women a focal point of this cookbook?
Umair Khan: When Zareen and I were first discussing the idea, I was obviously super excited as a writer that I’ll be able to create something like this. Zareen, of course, was excited to showcase Pakistani food and her recipes and her cooking, but I think really it came from her that she didn’t want this to be just a cookbook. She really did want it to be a project that takes forward that theme and mission of women empowerment that’s there throughout our restaurants and the rest of our lives.
Zareen Khan: Where I am is because of so many other women who paved the way for me. I want to be one of those women to help the next generation behind us move forward. If somebody’s not doing well or they are struggling in their job or the home, I feel like inspiring those women, supporting the charities that empower those women will also give them a chance to move forward and prove themselves and have belief in themselves.
Peninsula Foodist: A major theme of the cookbook is making Pakistani food accessible without sacrificing authenticity. How did you seek to find this balance?
Zareen Khan: I want it to be not so complex (readers) actually give up, so I simplified some of the recipes. It still won’t take away from the authenticity of the dish, but it will make it slightly easier for even somebody who is novice or is excited about Pakistani food to try it and not be disappointed that it’s such a long list of ingredients or takes so long. For me, it’s very important that all this knowledge that we’ve gained over generations is not lost in future generations because it’s too complex or time-consuming.
Umair Khan: We really wanted to showcase Pakistani food as its distinct cuisine. It’s a love letter to our childhood in Pakistan.
Peninsula Foodist: How did you decide which recipes to feature from the restaurant?
Zareen Khan: This book is based on some of the items we eat on a daily basis in Pakistan and India, and then we have also featured some of the dishes that are made on special occasions like biryani. We also wanted to feature some of the street food because you can’t get it here. Overall we did want to keep it slightly easier, so some of the more complex recipes were dropped because of that.
Umair Khan: We wanted representation of Pakistani home food, Pakistani street food, Zareen’s restaurant food. Obviously you can have 500 recipes around that, that’s how rich Pakistani cuisine is. We did have to pick and choose what would be the best representation. There are 40-50 recipes you can’t do without. But then there’s other stuff – Zareen’s family is from the Memon community, so we have four or five very specific things around that.
We wanted these three or four categories, and we wanted recipes that are representative of all, but of course we couldn’t fit all of them in. So we chose the ones that are most representative, that are still going to be accessible for the American home cook.
Peninsula Foodist: What were the most challenging aspects of writing the cookbook?
Umair Khan: This book is not ghostwritten and it’s not ghost-cooked. We made our home into a studio – this is months – and Zareen was literally cooking everything you see in there and sometimes cooking it two or three times, and that’s just for the photography. Then the women’s spotlight was a whole separate project. And then the front art, that was me and Zareen working with incredible artists for again several months to create this work of art. The cooking, the photography, the writing, the artwork and the women’s writing – that was five projects in one.
Zareen Khan: For me, the hardest thing was to choose which charities to make the 50% proceeds to, because there are so many charities that I love and to just choose one or two has been hard for me to decide on.
Peninsula Foodist: Which recipes evoke the most nostalgia?
Zareen Khan: The aloo gosht. When I was in Pakistan, I would come from college and it would always be the same dish and I’d hate it – it’s like, “Aw, again aloo gosht.” But it’s strange how things have turned out – now I kind of crave it, and the first thing I want when I go back home to Pakistan is to ask my sister to make that aloo gosht. Aloo gosht is basically a curry with potatoes and meat, like a stew.
Umair Khan: It’s the meat and potatoes staple of our childhood. It’s only now that we look back at it from this gulf of many years across an ocean that we love it even more. There’s so much stuff that’s nostalgic for me, but again a simple thing there is aloo qeema, which is spicy ground meat, stir-fried and cooked with potatoes.
Peninsula Foodist: Zareen, you say in the book that “Karachi will always be my hometown. But Palo Alto is home.” Can you expand on what makes Palo Alto home for you?
Zareen Khan: It’s the community feeling I get from Palo Alto. I get it in the other locations too, but maybe because my main focus was always Palo Alto and the way the community supported me through COVID. It feels like I’ve been cared for.
Umair Khan: It grows on you. As immigrants, we make new homes and new memories and new stories. I don’t think there was any particular moment during COVID that I and Zareen realized that this is it, but there are various moments that make you slowly realize that you built a wonderful new home and you belong. That sense of belonging doesn’t come immediately, and you can’t really take it for granted, especially these days.
It’s more than geography, it’s more than coastlines and great restaurants and attractions. It does come down to the people, and we’ve felt part of this community and we felt that we belong. This is home – it doesn’t mean that Pakistan will ever stop being our motherland and Karachi our hometown.
Peninsula Foodist: What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
Zareen Khan: I want to spread the love of cooking to people and make it accessible and enjoy a different way of cooking from a different world from somebody who’s basically a home cook – I was never trained professionally. You see some home-cooked meals in there and you also see some commercial recipes.
Umair Khan: The photographs are beautiful, the recipes – there’s real joy in how they’re laid out, how the book is laid out, from the cover art down. I want people to feel and enjoy this book. I’m excited about this being hopefully good cultural ambassadorship for Pakistanis and for Pakistani cuisine and Pakistani culture, but I just hope people think it’s a thing of beauty.
Zareen Khan: While you’re enjoying this work of art, I want people to also feel good that by supporting this book they are also supporting a lot of other causes that mean a lot to us and will have a good impact on the world.
“Zareen’s Pakistani Kitchen: Recipes from a Well-Fed Childhood” is available from major booksellers and independent bookstores. For more information, visit tinyurl.com/zareenspakistanikitchen.
Zareen’s, 365 S. California Ave., Palo Alto, 650-562-8700; 1477 Plymouth St., Mountain View, 650-628-6100; 2039 Broadway, Redwood City, 650-747-6400; Instagram: @zareensrestaurant.
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