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What started as a Mountain View food truck four months ago has just become the Peninsula’s only Azerbaijani restaurant.
Created by San Jose resident Hikmat Babayev, along with partners Elshan Musayev and Abulfaz Manafov, NAR Restaurant opened Saturday evening along El Camino Real in Mountain View. The three partners, all hailing from Azerbaijan, aim to bring authentic flavors from the region to the Peninsula, serving traditional dishes such as piti and shah plov as well as pomegranate wine and kampot.
NAR is a full-service restaurant specializing in cuisine from the Caucasus region – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and southern Russia. It also houses three ghost kitchen concepts offering an eclectic mix of halal Mediterranean dishes, New York-style pizza, burgers, wings, subs and Caucasus cuisine.
“Our story is a little bit weird,” Babayev said.
He and his business partners immigrated from Azerbaijan about three years ago, but they actually met in the Bay Area. Upon moving to the Bay Area, Babayev worked as a chef in a Korean restaurant, then a Chinese restaurant and eventually at the Peninsula Turkish restaurant Meyhouse, where he worked as sous chef for six months.
A mutual friend connected Babayev with Musayev, and the two men and their wives started wholesale baklava and cookie business Buta Bites together. The company’s products can be found at international markets, such as Rose International in Mountain View.
Babayev recalled that one day during his lunch break at Meyhouse, Musayev gave him a call and asked if he wanted to open a food truck.
“I said, ‘Hey, listen, I’m a sous chef here. Why should I go to the food truck?’” Babayev said. “And from that day, he started to insist on it, and we did it.”
In July, the pair and Manafov opened Olivia Bros, a Mediterranean food truck located in the parking lot of Embrace Luck, a Chinese restaurant that closed in June. The owner of Embrace Luck let Olivia Bros operate there while the restaurant was shuttered, but he had plans to remodel and reopen it.
“That guy started to come here and got to try our food, and he saw the people here, happy faces, and he decided to hand over this place to us,” Babayev said.
Given the opportunity to go from a small food truck to a 110-seat restaurant, they knew they had to utilize the large space to its fullest capacity. They brought on chef Teymur Piriyev, also from Azerbaijan, and decided to open NAR as both a sit-down restaurant and a to-go ghost kitchen. Olivia Bros would move inside NAR and become one of three takeout concepts. That way, customers who had been frequenting the food truck could still receive the same food for the same price.
Olivia Bros features dishes ranging from a chicken shawarma wrap and lamb shish kebab to burgers. Rosso (specializing in New York-style pizza) and CalSizzle (serving burgers, wings and subs) are the other two ghost kitchen concepts within NAR and are slated to open Nov. 20. During lunch, expected to begin Nov. 17, a special menu with a combination of dishes from each concept will be offered for dine-in.
“For lunch, I will do my best to keep the prices of fast food,” Babayev said. “I want the company people to come here, grab their food and go back to work. I want to give them a chance to sit, to get service, (and) have delicious food at a good price.”
At dinner, customers can order food to go from any of the three ghost kitchen concepts, via third-party delivery service or opt to dine in for upscale Caucasian cuisine.
NAR Restaurant’s dine-in dinner menu offers appetizers ($11-$19) such as gurza, traditional Azerbaijani dumplings filled with spiced lamb and served with yogurt sauce, and Azerbaijani-style dolma, which is made with butter and served warm.
Main courses ($18-$38) include ciz biz, a traditional Azerbaijani dish made from roast of lamb by-products, including liver and tail fat, pan-fried with potato spices; lule kebab, chargrilled minced lamb kebab; piti, slow-cooked lamb stew with chickpeas served in a clay pot; and shah plov, rice with lamb, dried fruit and spices baked inside a crispy crust of thin lavash bread.
Also expect traditional Georgian dishes, such as khinkali, hand-folded dumplings stuffed with spiced meat, and khachapuri, a cheese-filled, boat-shaped bread with an egg yolk. Dishes from the North Caucasus region include okroshka soup, a chilled yogurt-based soup with herbs and vegetables, and stroganoff, beef in a creamy mushroom sauce over rice.
The dessert menu includes Caucasian baklava, burnt Basque cheesecake and Malaga cake, a banana cream sponge cake coated with a chocolate glaze ($10-$12).
For drinks, NAR offers imported pomegranate wine from Azerbaijan, as well as wines from California and the country of Georgia. Nonalcoholic options include kampot, a drink made by boiling fruit in water before chilling it. Babayev likened the appearance of the beverage to a pickle jar with fruit floating in the liquid and said NAR will rotate the featured fruit seasonally.
The main focal point of the restaurant, which seats about 85 inside and 25 outside, is a hand-painted mural of a pomegranate tree. Nar means pomegranate, which is a symbol of fertility and barakat, or good fortune, Babayev said.
“Barakat means a lot of luck, wealth, success, and it’s a symbol of our people as well,” he said. “In the Caucuses, we have more than 60 nationalities in that small area, and each of them have their own language and their own cultures. But there are some things which are a common value, and nar can symbolize all of us together.”
Babayev said a big culture shock that he and his business partners experienced coming to America was the fast pace at which food is produced and eaten here. Speed is often prioritized over quality, he said, but that doesn’t work with Azerbaijani food, which Babayev considers a labor of love.
“We process and process and process food from one shape to another shape,” he said. “We have 43 types of rice food. The people spent a lot of time inventing new food, because we love the food.”
NAR Restaurant, 286 W. El Camino Real, Mountain View; 650-226-7900, Instagram: @narrestaurant_. Open Tuesday to Sunday from 5-10 p.m. Lunch, expected to start Nov. 17, will be from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Olivia Bros, 650-705-2007, @olivia_bros_mediterranean. Open daily for takeout, online ordering and third-party delivery from 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Rosso and CalSizzle are expected to open Nov. 20 with hours from 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily.
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Based on this excellent review, we decided to go to Nar this evening for dinner. It was fantastic. The atmosphere is beautiful, and the food is interesting and delicious. We received a warm welcome, which was a special part of the experience. I give this restaurant a big “Thumbs Up”. We will be back!