Have you ever tried Persian food? As an Iranian, I can tell you it is far more than simply delicious food. It carries memory, history, migration, family, grief, celebration, and survival all at once. Persian food is one of those things that follows you across borders. Even if you leave your country behind, somehow the smell of saffron rice, grilled kabab, fried onions, dried lime, or slow-cooked stew quietly waits for you somewhere in the world, ready to pull you backward through time.

As a writer who spent most of my life studying Persian and world literature, I genuinely believe there are many things in common between Persian food and Persian poetry. Both are layered. Both are emotional. Both rely on patience and subtlety rather than speed. Persian poets play with language the same way Persian cooks play with flavour. In Persian poetry, sweetness and bitterness often sit side by side. Love and grief dance together in the same verse. Persian food works similarly. Sour pomegranate molasses may meet the sweetness. Caramelized onions may soften sharp spices. Herbs, smoke, saffron, lemon, yogurt, turmeric, mint, cinnamon, and dried fruits all negotiate with one another like characters in an old story.

Nothing dominates completely. Everything converses.

Maybe that is why Persian meals often feel less like eating and more like listening to music slowly unfold.

Persian food has always had a strange power over me. It can interrupt my thoughts completely. It can distract me from stress, failure, anxiety, deadlines, or disappointment. Food becomes a temporary ceasefire between me and the world.

My mother knew this very well when I was a child. Whenever I became too noisy, too stubborn, or too dramatic, she did not argue much. She fed me.

And somehow, it worked.

Last year, when my wife and I were searching for a rental apartment in this neighbourhood, we were walking through the area while discussing prices, documents, applications, and all the exhausting details that come with trying to build a life in Toronto. We were speaking with our real estate agent as we wandered through the streets near Harbourfront.

Then suddenly, something happened.

I disappeared.

Not physically, of course. But mentally, emotionally, spiritually — for a brief moment, I was gone.

The smell found me before I found it.

It was the smell of kabab.

The scent wrapped around me so suddenly that I felt it physically. It felt as if the smell entered through my skin, grabbed my memories, and started running. Fast. The wind near the lake carried it beautifully. Harbourfront was windy that day. And perhaps that mattered more than I first realized.

I come from Yazd, an ancient desert city in central Iran — a city famous for its windcatchers, those breathtaking tower structures designed centuries ago to capture and circulate air through homes and buildings. Yazd is often called the City of Windcatchers. It is dry, historical, silent, spiritual, and unbelievably beautiful. Wind is part of its identity.

So I grew up understanding something about wind.

Wind does not simply move air. Sometimes it carries memory.

Sometimes it grabs your soul and pushes it backward into the history of yourself and your ancestors.

Standing there beside Toronto’s waterfront, with cold lake wind moving through the streets, I suddenly felt connected to another windy place thousands of kilometres away.

And then I was no longer an adult man searching for an apartment in Canada.

I was ten years old again.

I was standing beside my late father while he prepared kabab. Smoke surrounded us. My cousins and I jumped around impatiently, laughing, playing, breathing in the smell while waiting for food that somehow tasted larger than food itself. The oil from the meat would fall onto the fire like tears, creating even more smoke, more smell, more atmosphere. To an outsider, perhaps it would have looked ordinary. But to me, those moments now feel almost spiritual, like memories from an old temple preserved somewhere inside the body.

Food does that sometimes.

It preserves entire worlds.

One bite can reopen years you thought were gone forever.

Eventually, the wind returned me from the city where I was born to the city where I now live. I looked around again and realized something beautiful. I was living in a city of dialogue. A city where cultures, histories, smells, languages, and migrations constantly cross paths with one another.

Toronto is extraordinary in that way.

You can hear dozens of languages while walking only a few blocks. You can move from Caribbean food to Persian bakeries to Korean restaurants to Ethiopian coffee to Italian espresso bars within minutes. The city constantly negotiates identity through food.

And near me, unexpectedly, was Shater Abbass.

I truly was not expecting to encounter lamb kabab and chicken kabab so close to the waterfront. Somehow, discovering Persian food beside the lake felt surreal to me. In my memories, kabab belonged to bazaars, crowded family gatherings, old streets, smoke-filled restaurants, roadside grills, and desert evenings.

Yet there it was beside Toronto’s windy waterfront.

The city I was born in once lay along the Silk Road and engaged in its own form of multicultural exchange centuries ago. Traders, travellers, languages, fabrics, spices, and stories crossed paths there long before globalization became a modern buzzword.

Toronto feels like another version of that exchange.

A modern Silk Road beside the lake.

And perhaps that is why moments like this affect immigrants so deeply. Because sometimes, without warning, a smell or a taste reminds you that your past has not disappeared. It simply migrated with you quietly.

I still remember walking through old Persian bazaars with my parents as a child. One of the inseparable elements of those spaces was always the smoke of kabab rising into the air. That smoke was never smoke. It was an invitation. It was warmth. It was an appetite. It was a community.

A beautiful trap.

One I always wanted to fall into willingly.

But I never imagined I would encounter that same feeling near Lake Ontario, beside Harbourfront’s wind and water. Somehow, the lake breeze and the smoke of Shater Abbass kabab now work together like old friends, tempting passersby, calling people closer, inviting strangers into a culture through smell before language even begins.

And maybe that is one of the quiet beauties of Toronto.

Before we understand one another completely, we sometimes first learn about each other through food.

If you enjoy QAF Narrative, please consider sharing it with friends, colleagues, or anyone who may appreciate thoughtful writing on Toronto’s Harbourfront, culture, and city life.

I always welcome feedback, ideas, and conversations with readers. If you have any questions, suggestions, or requests, please feel free to contact me at:
[email protected]

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