At Noosh Kitchen, Persian Food Comes With a Feeling of Home
Noosh Kitchen in Johns Creek pairs traditional Persian dishes with a cozy, home-like atmosphere. The restaurant features unique decor made by staff and offers fresh breads, kabobs, and stews that reflect a diverse community.
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I love going back to Noosh Kitchen whenever I can because it combines two things I appreciate greatly in a restaurant: good food and the feeling of being welcomed into somebody’s home.
You notice the second part before you have eaten anything.
Noosh sits at 11880 Douglas Road in Johns Creek, just off Jones Bridge Road, where chef Nooshin Yazdani and Saied Ghaemi have been serving Persian food since 2012. Their roots reach back to Shiraz, Iran, and Saied’s attachment to the restaurant is difficult to miss. He moves through the room like someone who doesn’t merely work here but seems to notice every chair, plate and person who enters.
Look down and you can even see part of that story in the floor.
On one side of the dining room, large tiles were broken into irregular pieces and fitted together one by one into a mosaic. Saied told me he did the work himself. Eventually, after discovering just how much labor his artistic flooring experiment required, he surrendered and finished another section with conventional tiles.
It explains a small mystery of Noosh: why one restaurant has two distinctly different floors.
Much of both, anyway, disappears beneath long Persian rugs. There are flowers, dark wood, paintings, an olive tree and little decorative touches everywhere. The room feels assembled over time rather than ordered from a restaurant-design catalog.
Even some of the artwork has a Noosh connection. Paintings in the restaurant were made by Selma, a longtime member of the staff.
There cannot be many restaurants that effectively curate their walls from the work of their own. And what are the chances of finding that at a national chain?
Then comes the food.
One of my favorite moments at Noosh happens almost immediately: warm pieces of flatbread arrive with a little Persian spread of feta, walnuts, olives, fresh mint and radish, along with butter. It is simple, fresh and dangerously easy to keep eating while promising yourself that you are saving room for lunch.
The menu goes much deeper. There are the grilled meats that are often a gateway into Persian cooking: koobideh, made from seasoned ground beef; chicken kabob scented with saffron and lemon; beef barg; Cornish hen; lamb kabob and rack of lamb. Rice is not an afterthought here either. Persian cooking turns it into its own category, with saffron rice and variations incorporating ingredients such as lentils, raisins, cherries, herbs or lima beans.
Chicken with adas polo — rice with lentils and raisins — remains one of my favorite combinations.
For anyone ready to move beyond kabobs, Noosh offers another side of the Iranian kitchen. Ghormeh sabzi is the deeply herbal beef stew that is one of Iran’s great comfort foods. Fesenjan brings together toasted walnuts and pomegranate, here paired with duck confit. Kashk-e bademjan combines eggplant, mint, whey and fried onions, while mirza ghasemi takes eggplant in another direction with smoke, garlic and tomato.
Those dishes help explain why Noosh has lasted.
So do the people carrying them to the tables.
Yuri, for example, has a Russian-sounding name but comes from Brasília, Brazil. I remember him from some of my earliest visits years ago, and he is still here. Other members of the staff have similarly long histories with the restaurant.
In an industry famous for turnover, that is remarkable. Longtime employees tell you something about a restaurant that a menu cannot.
Noosh also reflects the unusual cultural mix of this corner of North Fulton. Around Persian celebrations, particularly Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, the connection to Atlanta’s Iranian community becomes especially visible. But on an ordinary afternoon, the dining room may include Iranian families alongside Indian, Korean and other local diners who simply discovered that Persian food deserves a place in their regular rotation.
That may be one reason Noosh feels particularly at home in Johns Creek.
This is one of the most internationally diverse communities in Georgia, and restaurants here increasingly function as little points of cultural exchange. You do not need to know what ghormeh sabzi is before walking through the door. Someone will explain it. You do not need to know why mint, walnuts, feta and radishes belong together. Eat them with warm bread and the explanation becomes unnecessary.
There are newer Persian restaurants around North Atlanta, grander dining rooms and more fashionable destinations. Noosh does not need to compete by pretending to be any of them.
After more than a decade, it has something much harder to manufacture: history.
It is there in the recipes, in the rugs, in Salma’s paintings, in Yuri still walking between the tables and even in that wonderfully impractical handmade floor Saied once decided to build piece by piece.
A restaurant can hire a designer to create atmosphere.
It is much harder to create a home.
Noosh Kitchen
11880 Douglas Road, Suite 200, Johns Creek, GA 30005
(770) 609-8133
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