When Haroon opened the doors of his new Pakistani restaurant in SoHo, he was not just launching a business — he was fulfilling a promise to a kitchen that shaped his entire life. Born in Pakistan and raised on his grandmother's cooking, Haroon always knew that her food deserved a bigger stage.
"My grandma was always big into cooking," Haroon says with a warmth that makes you feel like you are sitting at her table. "She's really good at making biryani. So the restaurant specializes in Pakistani-style biryani."
It is not just any biryani. Ask Haroon about the secret, and he laughs before giving you the answer: "It's all about chili powder." Then he pauses. "To be honest, it's more about the balance with the other spices. She's just really good at it." That balance — heat without heaviness, complexity without confusion — is what makes the dish sing, and it is what Haroon has spent years learning to replicate.
Choosing SoHo was deliberate. "I just thought the SoHo area needed a little bit more spice," he says simply. In a neighborhood known for its art galleries and fashion boutiques, a Pakistani biryani house feels like exactly the kind of surprise that makes New York the city it is.
The restaurant had barely been open before Haroon experienced the moment that confirmed everything. "We had people from Pakistan who now live in New York, who happened to be in the neighborhood, and they just walked into the restaurant," he recalls, his voice dropping with emotion. "They said it felt like a taste of home. That's what really hit."
For anyone who has ever moved thousands of miles from where they grew up, that phrase — a taste of home — carries a weight that no restaurant review can capture. It means the spices are right. The rice is right. The feeling is right. It means Haroon's grandmother's kitchen has traveled across the world and landed, somehow, in the middle of Manhattan.
The restaurant is still in its early days, but the word is spreading. SoHo locals are discovering that between the boutiques on Broadway and the galleries on Greene Street, there is now a place where the biryani is made with a grandmother's love and enough chili powder to remind you that great food should make you feel something.