Sam Babaei

Rich cuisine of Shandiz outweighs weak staff Sam Babaei has the credentials, experience and passion to finally revive an aura of excitement and reliability at 2310 Fair Oaks Blvd.The Sacramento Bee -- sacbee.com -- Rich cuisine of Shandiz outweighs weak staff
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Shandiz owner and head chef Sam Babaei displays some of his restaurant's special dishes.

Sacramento Bee/Erhardt Krause

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Sam Babaei has the credentials, experience and passion to finally revive an aura of excitement and reliability at 2310 Fair Oaks Blvd.

The question hanging over the place is whether he has the discipline and nerve to shape up a floundering staff hellbent on sabotaging his daring experiment.

Babaei, who also owns the restaurant Famous Kabob along Fulton Avenue, three months ago opened Shandiz Persian Cuisine in handsome and sunny quarters originally built for the grand old Fish Emporium in the mid- 1980s.

> The Fish Emporium flourished for about a decade before going belly-up.The comfortably slick facility has since gone through a succession of other operators.

Undaunted, Babaei not only has moved in, he's brought with him a high-risk style of cooking -- Persian, also known as Iranian, an exotic, involved cuisine that has had little exposure hereabouts.

What's more, Babaei makes few concessions to Western tastes, preserving the cuisine much as it has been traditionally prepared and presented.It calls for such rare ingredients as dried barberries, pomegranate sauce, fenugreek (a seed both slightly bitter and sweet, used to flavor curry powders and spice blends), rosewater and sun-dried limes.Cooking methods aren't so esoteric, though in Central Asian fashion, chicken dishes are cooked until no pink is visible, sometimes leaving the fowl dry to the Western palate.

In short, it's a cusine best interpreted by servers knowledgeable, enthusiastic and patient, but the Shandiz serving staff is ill-informed and tentative.

The kitchen crew deserves more respect.
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Sam Babaei has the credentials, experience and passion to finally revive an aura of excitement and reliability at 2310 Fair Oaks Blvd.