One of the most-loved dishes from Pulteney Street restaurant Naaz – a sweet-salty combination of olives, pomegranate and walnuts – is now available in take-home form.

When Pulteney Street restaurant Naaz Persian Cuisine (formerly Naaz on Pulteney) opened in 2019, its founders had one aim: showcase the flavours and culture of northern Iran.

The restaurant was specifically interested in Rasht, the largest city in Iran’s Gilan Province, located a short distance from the Caspian Sea, which is recognised as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy.

This is the region Naaz’s founders, Mali Ershad and Omid Moghaddami, come from, and the walls of the restaurant are host to cultural artefacts from their home city.

Naaz’s menu is predominantly Persian rice dishes and stews, with a selection of smaller side dishes too – one of which has become an unsuspecting star at the restaurant.

Zeytoon parvardeh, or marinated olives, is served at Naaz as a side dish and as part of the Naaz sini (tasting platter). While marinated olives is not a novel concept, the Rasht expression is rare in Adelaide.

The olives are marinated in a combination of pomegranate paste, walnuts, garlic, herbs and “and some secret spices”, laughs Mali.

“The combination of sweet and sourness and salty olives, this combination together, I think, makes this product special,” Mali says.

“It’s not easy to have, for example, salty things with sweet things, and you prefer to have, ‘Ok, I’m having sweet things now, I don’t want to have any salty’, but… the result is excellent.”

Almost as soon as the restaurant launched, Mali and Omid started receiving compliments on the dish. “They are telling me and other staff, ‘That was excellent’. That is a good word for this thing,” Mali says.

So consistent was the praise, Omid began to pursue the idea of bottling the marinated olives for sale. He first contacted the council, who referred him to Food SA, and after a delegate from that organisation visited the restaurant to try the dish, the idea began to pick up momentum.

A year and a half later, Omid and Mali have launched a sister business to the restaurant – Naaz Persian Fine Food, which has a lineup of three Naaz side dishes, sealed up in jars: pomegranate olives, pickled garlic and pickled vegetables.

The three products are currently available via the restaurant and will soon be available for sale online.

For Omid, the pomegranate olive’s warm reception is a meaningful sign of the progress he is making in bringing Adelaide closer to his culture and heritage.

“Somehow, we are trying to introduce our cuisine to Adelaide, trying to show in what way we dine and what are the main ingredients,” Omid says.

“Because that unique ingredients, or the way we cook or prepare our food, it’s, again, unique in our culture, and even will be more unique here because of the different environment.

“If I’m not mistaken, it’s coming from hundreds years ago, in that region. Even grandparents, they could make something like that, and now it reached to us, and reached to this part of the world.

“Guaranteed there is no similar product in southern hemisphere, not even northern hemisphere – only northern Iran, only. Now Adelaide is 100 per cent lucky to have it.”