Berenjak brings Tehran-style grilling to Chicago

Berenjak, the Tehran-inspired kebab house from JKS Restaurants, opens its fourth location inside Soho House's Fulton Market building in Chicago this month, its first stop outside London.

Chef Kian Samyani built the original Soho restaurant around childhood memories of Tehran's kebab shops: charcoal grills working through the night, baskets of flatbread for scooping up dips, and family-style plates meant to be picked over rather than plated per person. The Chicago menu follows the same format rather than reinventing it for an American crowd.

A members' club goes public

A kebab house that took eight years to leave London just skipped straight to the Midwest.

Unlike some of JKS's other US ventures, Berenjak Chicago will be open to anyone, not only Soho House members. Reservations open on Berenjak's own site this month, with walk-ins accepted at the bar.

The location sits two doors from Black Briar, chef Jimmy Papadopoulos's own Fulton Market opening from earlier this month, adding to a stretch of the neighbourhood that has turned into one of Chicago's densest restaurant rows.

Charcoal, bread and family-style plates

The format leans on kebabs threaded onto flat skewers and grilled directly over charcoal, a technique that renders fat quickly while keeping the meat's interior from drying out. Bread, herbs and yoghurt dips arrive first, in the manner of a Tehran kebab counter, with the grilled plates meant to be torn apart and shared rather than served as individual mains.

JKS Restaurants, whose portfolio also includes Gymkhana's expansion into Dubai, has treated Berenjak as its slowest-growing brand since the concept opened in Soho in 2018, adding locations roughly once every two years. Chicago breaks that pattern by launching outside the UK for the first time.

No date has been set for further US openings, but the group said Chicago will act as a test of whether the format travels before any wider expansion.

Fulton Market has spent the past decade turning from meatpacking warehouses into one of the country's densest restaurant districts, and an established London import raises the profile of a street that already counts a Michelin-starred kitchen among its tenants.