Iranian Food & drink

Iranian food and drink in Germany, on one page. This page sits above four separate kinds of business and its job is to point you at the right one: restaurants for a meal at a table, cafés for an hour over tea and something sweet, bars for the evening, and catering for when the food has to arrive at your own party.

What the Verified badge does and does not say

Verified says one thing only: a real person stands behind this profile and manages it themselves. YabInfy does not check anyone's certificates, licences, experience or competence, and the badge is not for sale.

Which of the four you are looking for

• Restaurants: a full meal at a table, usually rice, stews and kababs. For the evening you want home cooking without doing the cooking, or for a gathering too big for a flat.
• Cafés: tea, coffee and pastry, somewhere to meet for an hour or sit with a laptop. Depending on the place there may be Persian ice cream and faloodeh, or no hot food at all, so ask first if you are arriving hungry.
• Bars: evenings and drinks, sometimes with live music. If what you want is dinner, this is not the category to start from.
• Catering: food for a crowd, in a place you choose: a wedding, a memorial, a birthday, or a party that has outgrown the plates in the cupboard. Here you are the client, not the guest, which is why the questions change.

A menu written for German readers, where one dish has three spellings

Persian dish names have no official Latin spelling, and in Germany they are written so a German speaker can pronounce them off the page. The same dish then turns up three ways on three menus. A few rules hold:

• The "sh" sound becomes sch and "j" becomes dsch, which is why Asch-e Reschte is ash-e reshteh, the noodle and herb soup, and Dschudsche is joojeh, chicken.
• Q and gh appear as gh or plain g, and a "z" mid-word often becomes s, since that is the sound s makes in German. So Ghormeh Sabzi, Gorme Sabsi and Ghorme Sabzi are one stew.
• Tahchin appears as Tahchin, Tachin or Tah Chin, glossed in German as a saffron rice cake, which does not help you place it.

Kabab is a category, not a dish, and menus rarely spell out the difference: koobideh is minced, barg a flattened fillet, joojeh chicken, soltani one skewer of each of two kinds. If the menu just says Kebab Teller, ask which skewers are on it and whether rice is counted in the price.

The simplest route is the obvious one: ask in Persian. Somebody in almost all of these businesses speaks it and knows the dish by the name you use. By phone, say the Persian name and then the menu number.

Ordering for an occasion, and how far ahead that really needs to be

Two dates fill every kitchen at once: Yalda night and the days around Nowruz. They are fixed in the calendar and everybody thinks of them at the same moment, which makes the final week the worst possible time to call. Depending on the kitchen, a group order for those wants a few weeks of notice, while an ordinary mehmooni is usually fine at one or two weeks. Only the business can give you their own number.

Ordering for a group, settle these at the start:

• The minimum order, in portions or guests, below which they will not take it.
• Delivery or collection: whether they bring it, what that costs, and how far out they travel.
• Hot, or to be reheated: whether it arrives ready to eat or expects you to warm it, and whether warming trays and fuel come with it.
• Plates and cutlery: whether disposables are in the price, and whether large dishes come back.
• The deadline for changing numbers: guest counts move until the last moment, so ask which day the number locks and what happens to the deposit.

The halal question, answered honestly

Let us be plain: YabInfy does not check whether any food is halal. There is no field we have verified and no certificate we have looked at. Anything a profile says on it is that business speaking for itself. If it matters to you, ask precisely, because "we are halal" covers a lot of ground:

• Where the meat comes from, whether there is a halal certificate, and whether you can see it.
• All the meat, or only some of it: a kitchen may source red meat as halal and buy chicken or sausage elsewhere.
• Whether pork is in the kitchen at all, and if it is, whether the grill and the fryer oil are shared.
• Alcohol: many restaurants serve beer and wine and see no conflict with halal meat. If you do, ask separately. Bars, by their nature, are built around alcohol.

These answers change when a supplier changes, so do not carry last year's answer into this year.

Ruhetag, kitchen hours and how booking works here

• The weekly closing day, the Ruhetag: many places shut one fixed day a week, often Monday or Tuesday. Hours online go stale quickly, so confirm by phone for a specific day.
• Kitchen hours are not opening hours: the kitchen stops well before the room does, and some places stop serving between lunch and dinner. Arriving late, ask when the last food order goes in.
• Booking: for two people usually unnecessary, for a larger group or a weekend not. Sunday counts as a weekend here: the shops are shut, so the restaurants are full. Phoning is normal and works better than an online form.
• Paying and tipping: some places still take cash only, or cards above a minimum. The tip is said out loud as you pay, rather than left on the table.

What to ask when you call

• Today's kitchen hours, not the ones printed online, and which day they close.
• Whether you need to book, and whether today's menu matches the website, since many stews are cooked for the day.
• What they have without meat, and whether it contains kashk or yoghurt.
• For a group order: the minimum, the deadline, and how delivery works.
• YabInfy checks none of this, so ask for it yourself, and ask to see the document where it matters.

Choosing from this list

Reviews earn their keep here in one direction and not the other. They help when they describe something repeatable: whether the food matched what was ordered, how long it took, whether a group order arrived on time. They help less when they are pure preference, since "a bit too salty" tells you more about the writer than the kitchen. One bad night is not a verdict; several separate reviews naming the same fault is. Look at the dates too, because cooks move on and the food moves with them.

For restaurants, cafés and bars, place decides everything, so start from the city list at the bottom of this page. For catering it decides less: many kitchens deliver to the towns around them, so ask the nearest large city how far out they come.

YabInfy never reveals who opened a profile, who looked at a number, or who got in touch, and the business owner does not see it either. The one public thing is the review you leave, under whatever name you choose. Each profile keeps its contact route behind "Show contact details", which reaches the place itself with nobody in between.

The four pages worth opening next are restaurants, cafés, bars and catering. How the site itself works is in the FAQ, and if you run a kitchen, a café or a bar yourself, add your business.