As the city's bakeries become increasingly culturally specific, representing a variety of cuisines and styles (see Librae in the East Village, which uses Danish techniques and Middle Eastern ingredients like za'atar and black lime), they are also leaning toward a New York culinary identity. Radio Bakery, a branch of Rolo's in Ridgewood, sells bacon, egg and cheese focaccia by the slice; Inspired by the Jewish history of the Lower East Side, Elbow Bread serves a challah croissant and buckwheat latte.
Perhaps none of them are as specific as Diljan. Ford's business partners are Ali Zaman and Mohamed Ghiasi, a pair of Afghan-American restaurateurs. Zaman, 30, and Ghiasi, 28, attended the same high school in Queens as their fathers, veterans of the local restaurant industry. In 2021, the younger Zaman and Ghiasi opened Little Flower, a halal coffee shop in Astoria that has become a favorite spot of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who also frequents Zaman's father's restaurant, Sami's Kabab House. Ford, who lived in Astoria, was also a Little Flower regular, and Zaman and Ghiasi hired him to revamp the cafe's pastry menu, creating dishes like jalapeño cheddar pie with halal beef bacon. When the couple decided to open Diljan, where they planned to focus on naan-e panjayi—the chewy, yeasty Afghani flatbread they grew up eating—their first port of call was Ford.
Diljan on Hicks Street is not far from the huge lines at L'Appartement 4F, but even closer to the stretch of Atlantic Avenue where Lebanese and Syrian immigrants flocked in the mid-twentieth century, after the decline of Manhattan's Little Syria. The street is lined with tried-and-true Middle Eastern establishments, including the sparse but cozy Yemen Café, with steaming plates of slow-roasted lamb and a sweet milk tea dispenser for self-serve, and Sahadi's Grocery, which still uses deli takeout tickets to fill orders for dried fruit and nuts by the pound.
Zaman and Ghiasi—a former theater actor and real estate developer, respectively—have a talent for tapping into classic New York tropes. After Little Flower, they opened a halal fast food counter called Blue Hour in a gas station in Bushwick; Diljan's interior, with its crimson tiles and stainless steel counter, is meant to evoke both the Afghan flag and the sidewalk coffee carts their fathers used. “I think people just think Afghan food is something like kebab, and it’s more than that,” Zaman told me. Standing behind the counter, Ford handed me a piece of fluffy golden finger-pierced bread, its shiny surface speckled with sesame and nigella seeds, for me to eat with a couple of cream cheese dips. One was topped with chopped beef bacon and green onions. The other was mixed with cherry jam, inspired by a simple breakfast from Zaman and Ghiasi's childhood. (Their parents would substitute the Philly for the clotted cream they might have eaten in Afghanistan.)
In Afghan cuisine, naan-e panjayi is ubiquitous: it can be found both at breakfast and at dinner with stews and fried dishes. Before signing with Diljan, Ford had never achieved success. He started by researching what kind of wheat grew in Afghanistan. From American mills, Ford purchased stone-ground flour from varieties similar to those most commonly found in Afghanistan and began experimenting, testing each version of the bread with Zaman, Ghiasi and their families. Zaman and Ghiasi commented on how wheaty it must taste (very); Sami, Zaman's father, would tell Ford if it was too thick or too salty. The rows of dimples, Ford told me, should be as straight as arrows. “I'm still working on it,” he added.
The bread's dimples and oblong shape give it a passing resemblance to focaccia, although Ford seemed to find the comparison inappropriate. “It might remind me of focaccia because I learned how to make focaccia first, but that’s just part of the system we’re trying to break, right?” – he said. “There are so many Italian and French bakeries because it's the standard, but I think there should be more people getting into these baked goods.” Ford hopes to differentiate Diljan by prioritizing tradition over hype. “We won't sell anything that we call croissants,” he said, although he acknowledged that “any successful bakery” sells pastries. “People just love this shit,” he continued. “So what do we do? We use Afghani flavors. We didn't want to do pistachio pink,” a Middle Eastern combination that has become a baking cliché. “This needs to be deeper,” he said, assessing a tray of laminated confections. One, shaped like a crisper crescent than a typical croissant, is curved like the coat of arms of the Ottoman Empire; Ford filled it with a pale yellow pastry cream, which gave it the name Saffron Shah. From a small tray of pure pira—an Afghan milk fudge made with cardamom and orange blossom water—he used a cookie cutter to cut out shiny circles to fit into the Danish pastry, between layers of vanilla cookie buttercream and diplomatic cream. The texture of the finished product was deliciously lush, with bits of crispy golden crumb melting into a nice sticky fudge and rich custard.
