The Last Days of Café Leila Quotes

“Maybe we don’t really grow up until our parents die, she thought. Maybe her infant memory was forever looking to Zod and Pari to make things better because they always did. Because if our parents didn’t exalt us, we spend our adult lives blaming them—for not doing this, and not doing that, not being “supportive,” not making an appearance at our first recital, being overprotective or aloof, damaging our self-esteem. Yet at our best or worst, who sees everything? Who knows us best? Who waits and waits to see what we yet may be? Then one day they’re gone and it’s just you, and there’s nothing left to squeeze, no one to blame for the dismay over the course your life has taken. Once the tears have stopped, it’s just the here and now and the desire to do better, to be closer to the person you want to be. Noor”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“To live into your forties thinking it was you who brightened rooms, because nothing of what you had seen so far prepared you for the truth: how small and inconsequential your so-called luster, how easily extinguished and utterly dark.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“It’s the same everywhere, she thought, they’re small and they live with you and you’re in love with them and they move away and a slightly bigger version of them moves in. Then you fall in love again, only to watch that little person leave, and yet a slightly taller, more agile version, who still fits in the toddler bed, but just barely, arrives and there you go again, head over heels. Another birthday will come and this one, too, will go, pigtails and all, and so on, until your heart could burst. You see them turn two, then three and four and you miss that tiny newborn who smelled like milk, the one-year-old who teeter-tottered, and how sweet was that two-year-old who would not let go of your hand, and do you remember running alongside her bicycle at five? Where did she go? Noor”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“Maybe if you’ve lived as long as he had, you knew all too well that looking for blame was futile, that you need not go back and ask for explanations.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“The cuisine of Northern Iran, overlooked and underrated, is unlike most Persian food in that it's unfussy and lighthearted as the people from that region. The fertile seaside villages of Mazandaran and Rasht, where Soli grew up before moving to the congested capital, were lush with orchards and rice fields. His father had cultivated citrus trees and the family was raised on the fruits and grains they harvested.
Alone in the kitchen, without Zod's supervision, he found himself turning to the wholesome food of his childhood, not only for the comfort the simple compositions offered, but because it was what he knew so well as he set about preparing a homecoming feast for Zod's only son. He pulled two kilos of fava beans from the freezer. Gathered last May, shucked and peeled on a quiet afternoon, they defrosted in a colander for a layered frittata his mother used to make with fistfuls of dill and sprinkled with sea salt. One flat of pale green figs and a bushel of new harvest walnuts were tied to the back of his scooter, along with two crates of pomegranates- half to squeeze for fresh morning juice and the other to split and seed for rice-and-meatball soup. Three fat chickens pecked in the yard, unaware of their destiny as he sharpened his cleaver. Tomorrow they would braise in a rich, tangy stew with sour red plums, their hearts and livers skewered and grilled, then wrapped in sheets of lavash with bouquets of tarragon and mint. Basmati rice soaked in salted water to be steamed with green garlic and mounds of finely chopped parsley and cilantro, then served with a whole roasted, eight kilo white fish stuffed with barberries, pistachios, and lime. On the farthest burner, whole bitter oranges bobbed in blossom syrup, to accompany rice pudding, next to a simmering pot of figs studded with cardamom pods for preserves.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“Growing up it had been her entire world, an oasis where on hot summer afternoons they drank iced mint sherbets under a canopy of trees, and when the sun went down they ate juicy kebabs on three-feet-long skewers. As the evening wore on, they lit lanterns and the yard acquired depth like a stage. The waiters wheeled out a three-tiered chariot of fruit compotes, rum babas, crème caramel, and charlotte russe, with bottles of liqueurs and digestifs glowing on the lower shelf. Soon after, the music would start. Noor sat on her grandmother's lap, spooning pistachio ice cream into her mouth with vanilla wafers, while Pari serenaded them.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“whatever her own parents did or didn’t do was nothing short of heroic and”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“river in northern France?” She mumbled something and slouched away. What had they taught her in nursing school? he wondered. AFTER LUNCH THE TAXI driver safely returned them home and Zod, exhausted from the outing, dozed on the couch, snoring”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“He requested recipes from his mother and combed the markets for ingredients, shaping his nostalgia for her cooking into Sunday meals- pickled beets with crème fraîche, crabapple and cabbage dumplings, plum turnovers- and filling envelopes with fantasy menus addressed to Nina. Maman, we must add crepe soufflé to our desserts. You simply fold meringue into your vanilla custard, spoon it into the pancakes, fold them in half, sprinkle with sugar, and bake them. They puff into golden pillows!”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“Alone in the kitchen, without Zod's supervision, he found himself turning to the wholesome food of his childhood, not only for the comfort the simple compositions offered, but because it was what he knew so well as he set about preparing a homecoming feast for Zod's only son. He pulled two kilos of java beans from the freezer. Gathered last May, shucked and peeled on a quiet afternoon, they defrosted in a colander for a layered frittata his mother used to make with fistfuls of dill and sprinkled with sea salt. One flat of pale green figs and a bushel of new harvest walnuts were tied to the back of his scooter, along with two crates of pomegranates- half to squeeze for fresh morning juice and the other to split and seed for rice-and-meatball soup. Three fat chickens pecked in the yard, unaware of their destiny as he sharpened his cleaver. Tomorrow they would braise in a rich, tangy stew with sour red plums, their hearts and livers skewered and grilled, then wrapped in sheets of lavash with bouquets of tarragon and mint. Basmati rice soaked in salted water to be steamed with green garlic and mounds of finely chopped parsley and cilantro, then served with a whole roasted, eight kilo white fish stuffed with barberries, pistachios, and lime. On the farthest burner, whole bitter oranges bobbed in blossom syrup, to accompany rice pudding, next to a simmering pot of figs studded with cardamom pods for preserves.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“It wasn't that Nina didn't make equally tasty buns, but Zod, her rogue apprentice, had refined the dough to a featherlight brioche with a subtle tang. He filled the pockets not just with beef and onions, but peach jam, saffron rice pudding, smoked sturgeon, potatoes and dill, cabbage and caraway apples, duck confit and chopped orange peel, and, once, even a pearl that fell into the lemon custard when Nina's necklace snapped, beads hitting the counter like hailstones.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“Lush, with all her shyness gone, Noor's thinking on this evening was anything can happen. And it did, only it was nothing like the scenes of urgent, breathless arousal she'd seen on film, but a murmur, a slow and quiet awakening of a fantastic feeling she didn't know existed; his body moving around her, an explorer's voice in the dark, responding to her smallest breath.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“The eternal tracing and patching took weeks: walnut and caraway strudel, apricots in syrup, chicken necks with turnips and prunes, ponchik (fried dough balls filled with custard), rice porridge, vatrushki (savory tarts), beef pelmeni, kulich, each one translated by a family friend in exchange for meals. His mother had salvaged these formulas from the hands of Bolshevik barbarians, learned what she could from them, and stowed them away until fate brought another round of fanatics to their door.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“Men sat behind charcoal braziers turning ears of corn and fanning skewered liver kebabs they slipped sizzling into pockets of lavash bread with a tangle of cilantro and mint. Ribbons of fruit leather, apricot, plum, tamarind, and cherry, draped like laundry from wires strung between awnings.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“In the thirty years sine Yanik had tied an apron around her belly and shown Nina how to separate eggs, she had explored countless recipes, decoded the subtleties of Persian food, its ancient alchemy of sweet and sour, hot and cold, its deference to plants and herbs, soliciting Naneh Goli's palate to measure and fine-tune. What triumph to turn out a pot of rice with a golden potato tadig- that magical crust beneath the steamed rice.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“In preparation for a feast to welcome the newlyweds, crates of melons, eggplants, tomatoes, basil, apricots, and figs were stacked in the shade. Naneh Goli sat at a table set outside the kitchen, stringing green beans to cook with minced beef in a bright tomato sauce for lubia polo- a favorite dish of Zod's boyhood. Forty game hens already lay in their saffron yogurt marinade, and tomorrow they would roast them over an open fire to serve with mounds of jeweled rice.
All morning Yanik shaped lamb koofteh (meatballs) mixed with allspice and thyme, browning them in small batches and infringing on Nina's burners, which she needed to simmer mulberry preserves for parfait.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“Most of her recipes came from her father, but Noor learned how to make the luscious potato cake from Nelson's mother. The recipe her mother-in-law had whispered into Noor's ear was the authentic one used by Nelson's great-grandmother. In its own unpresumptuous way, the Spanish Tortilla is an honest love omelet, and every bite must be suffused with fragrant olive oil- in this case, too much of a good thing is not a sin. Even when Noor was an amateur and the potatoes were sometimes raw, Nelson would say, "Oh my God! That was the best tortilla of my whole life!" Which of course wasn't true, but he was acknowledging the effort of peeling and slicing immense quantities of potatoes.
What she loved most about Spanish food was its lusty simplicity, so unlike the gastronomical somersaults of French cuisine or the complexity of the Persian food she grew up with. When she was little she could eat pyramids of saffron rice and rich meat stews, but she now associated the colors and perfumes of her husband's native cuisine with their courtship, with paddleboats and honeymoons and champagne in silver buckets, with flamenco and candlelight and little fried sardines with sea salt by the water. Her postcards were menus, smudged and wine-stained, saved from their meals, addressed to herself and read carefully like romance manuals.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“Laid out before him were dishes detailed in gold inscription: Tourte de Faisan aux Truffes, Blanquette de Veau, Barbue aux Huîtres, Tripes à la mode de Caen. Simon explained the preparation of each dish so lovingly that it would have suited Zod to not eat at all and simply listen to this man as he translated the truffled pheasant in pastry, the creamy veal stew with pearl onions and mushrooms, the poached brill with oysters in brown butter, the baked tripe with calvados, and the wine they must order to accompany it,”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“They sat under a walnut tree on wooden benches draped with kilims and soon the table was covered with small dishes of yogurt, olives cured with angelica, eggplant and whey cooked to a silky paste, piles of basil, cilantro, and tarragon, and a pitcher of doogh, the tangy yogurt drink spiked with mint”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“He desperately wanted to hear Lily say merci again, but Naneh Goli folded a piece of naan around a boiled egg, placed it in his knapsack, and pushed him out the door with a long list of instructions he didn't hear. All he could think was, I fell in love at eight fifteen on the morning of June 9.
Later that afternoon he scurried around the kitchen, underfoot until Naneh Goli sent him to the storeroom for jam. The cellar, illuminated by a bulb on a string, was like a pharmacy, with shelves of rosewater, orange blossom water, quince syrup, lime syrup, vinegars, and jars of pickled vegetables, all painstakingly labeled in Agha (Mr.) Zod's shaky script. Karim paused to read the labels but found nothing to ease the knocking in his chest, so he took the last jar of fig preserves for Lily. His Lily jan (dear), Lily rose, Lily shirin (sweet), Lily morning, Lily moon, Lily merci.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“Karim could not keep from staring at her- so exotic was this creature before him, with honey eyes and glossy lips like a candy he could lick off her face. It was as if a door had opened and he had walked through it. Everything behind him had fallen into a deep abyss and never again could he retrace his steps to that boy, the one with unruly hair and scraped kneecaps, caught roaches and mice with bare hands, who sometimes smelled like a wet sheep. What solitude he had lived in. His world expanded with Lily in the kitchen and it was all very new looking. Then, realizing his dirty nails and ugly pants, he was deeply embarrassed and hid behind Soli, his heart beating in big thumps.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“Lily heard feet padding along the landing outside her room and then her mother pushed open the door without knocking, carrying a breakfast tray: bread and jam, a glass of pomegranate juice, and a pot of tea. Yesterday, Lily couldn't drink the milk. It was warm, tasted too much like cow, and the egg yolks were bright orange, so she just ate the naan. She had never before eaten flatbread like this- baked on hot stones, dimpled and crusty, it tasted sour and earthy and so delicious, she could eat an entire slab.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“I have just taught Soli to make borscht! Yesterday I bought beets with big, glossy leaves still caked with wet soil. Naneh washed them in the tub until her arthritis flared, but she's promised to make dolmas with the leaves. After we closed Soli tucked the beets under coals and roasted them all night. When I woke up I smelled caramel and winter and smoke. It made me so hungry, I peeled a hot, slippery one for breakfast and licked the ashes and charred juices off with my burnt fingertips. Noor, bruised from betrayal, remembered borscht, remembered stirring sour cream into the broth and making pink paisley shapes with the tip of her spoon, always surprised by the first tangy taste, each time anticipating sweetness. Her mother had called it a soup for the brokenhearted.
She marveled at her father's enthusiasm for borscht, when for thirty years each day had been a struggle. Another man would've untied his apron long ago and left the country for a softer life, but not Zod. He would not walk away from his courtyard with its turquoise fountain and rose-colored tables beneath the shade of giant mulberry trees, nor the gazebo, now overgrown with jasmine, where an orchestra once played and his wife sang into the summer nights.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila

“In the 1930's Yanik brought blinis and apple charlottes, beef stroganoff and kulich to Tehran, opening the first confectionary with a garden café. He came with his wife, Nina, who spooned cinnamon-scented ground beef and onions into delicate piroshkies and learned to cook Persian food by trial and error, nourishing her family and customers with a generous spirit, mingling delicately with neighbors, and learning to speak Farsi. To steady their leap across borders, Yanik changed his surname from Yedemsky to Yadegar, and planted a small orchard of pomegranate, almond, and mulberry trees that would shade the terrace tables.”
― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila