Chef de cuisine Ali Saboor, cooking in Brooklyn’s Sofreh. Photo: Janice Chung Every restaurant opening experiences unintended delays, but when Nasim Alikhani and Akis Petroulas signed a lease at 252 Varet St. in Bushwick, they couldn’t have known that their new teahouse, Sofreh Café, would end up being delayed for more than a year because, well, the entire world was about to transform completely.
Nasim Alikhani planned for years before finally opening Sofreh. Photo: Janice Chung In January of 2020, Alikhani had flown back to the United States after a two-week trip to visit family in Isfahan, Iran. At the time, life still looked mostly normal in both countries, but Iran was running slightly ahead of the U.S. on the global-pandemic timeline, and it wasn’t long before Alikhani’s sister-in-law, a doctor, began to tell her stories from her country’s hospitals.
Finishing a plate of roasted cauliflower. Photo: Janice Chung Alikhani advised workers to gargle with mouthwash before bed, and, because people still thought the virus spread through surfaces, she placed buckets of diluted bleach around the restaurant. After every task, she told the staff, they should submerge their hands to kill the germs. “We’re just like, That sounds awful,” recalls Samantha, who worked as a manager at the time .
At the same time, Sofreh had the same problems as every other pandemic-era New York City restaurant: no customers, no revenue, and a mounting sensation of doom. Because Alikhani and Petroulas owned the building, they were spared the need to negotiate their rent, and they weren’t blind to that reality, but except for their first PPP loan , there was no money coming in, no reopening date, and no foreseeable end to the pandemic.
Server Antonio Gross saw the shutdown as his chance to make a graceful exit from Sofreh, where he was starting to grow disillusioned. “I really feel like this pandemic has shown me hospitality’s big lie, which is that they don’t love the guest,” he says. “We call it ‘hospitality,’ but really, it’s service. They’re paying for servitude. No guest is bringing their best self to a restaurant.”
Alikhani did offer a job to everyone who’d been laid off, just as she’d promised in the haze of March. By June, most of the staff had returned. Alikhani had ordered special masks for the reopening, made from the same hand-stamped fabric as the aprons. They were beautiful — and sweltering. After a few weeks, she dropped them: Regular masks were fine. But, some staff say, Alikhani was still concerned with the aesthetic experience above all else.
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