Pardeh brings Persian sharing plates to Bethnal Green
Chef Yma Apa and first-time restaurateur Sahar Gilabadi open a 42-cover dining room this autumn, built around curtains, rhythm and his own memory of Iran.
Pardeh, a 42-cover Persian restaurant from chef Yma Apa, opens this autumn in Bethnal Green, East London.
The restaurant takes over the former Waterhouse Project site on Corbridge Crescent. It is the first hospitality venture for Sahar Gilabadi, a theatre designer who runs it with her husband, Sam Butler.
Apa was born in Tehran and built his London name with Tehran Berlin and The Drunken Butler, two restaurants that leaned on European technique to frame Iranian flavours. Pardeh moves further from that European reference point, built instead around his own memories of food at home.
A curtain promises a reveal, not a spectacle. Pardeh plays that trick with food instead of fabric.
The meaning behind Pardeh
Pardeh means curtain in Farsi. The word also names a fret on Persian stringed instruments, and the restaurant borrows both meanings: a menu built on rhythm and anticipation, where a recognisable dish arrives first and a less expected one follows.
Most dishes are designed for sharing. Diners can stop for one plate and a drink at the bar, or hand the table to the kitchen for a longer, chef-directed sequence.
Bethnal Green's Persian opening
Gilabadi's background in stage design shows in the room. The 42 covers sit across a space built around layers and partial views rather than one open floor, a physical echo of the curtain in the name.
Pardeh joins a run of Persian and Iranian openings in London over the past two years, from Nutshell in Covent Garden to newer sites run by chefs with family ties to Tehran and Isfahan. Bethnal Green, long anchored by Vietnamese and Bangladeshi kitchens, adds another cuisine to that stretch of the Hackney Road.
The borough has absorbed openings fast this decade, and diners now cross the city for a single dish rather than stick to one postcode. Pardeh is betting that a tasting sequence, not a signature plate, will be the reason people make that trip, a wager that fits into London's wider shifting dining map.
The restaurant has not published prices. An exact opening date will follow once the fit-out of the Corbridge Crescent site is finished.
Apa has cooked other people's references into Iranian food twice already. Pardeh is the first room built entirely around his own.
