My mother, the Persian cook who fed the New York art scene

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Leila Heller’s mother was an excellent cook. When she lived in Tehran, Empress Farah Pahlavi – one of many family friends who sampled her cooking – suggested she write a cookbook. Then the revolution happened. Nahid Taghinia-Milani, known as Nahid Joon, left Iran in 1979 and ended up in New York with her husband and children. There her cooking took on greater significance: it became a means of preserving her heritage and bringing family and friends together. It also turned her into a star in the New York art world, thanks to a series of dinners she helped cater for her daughter’s gallery that became known as the tastiest invite in town.

Her friendships were multigenerational. People came for advice and stayed to be fed

“My mother’s legacy was her cooking,” writes Heller in Persian Feasts: Recipes & Stories from a Family Table (Phaidon), a new cookbook filled with her mother’s dishes. Among them, her Persian chicken salad, herb frittata, stuffed grape leaves, fesenjan (walnut, aubergine and pomegranate stew), braised lamb shanks and barberry rice. The founder of an eponymous gallery, Heller has been a fixture on the New York art scene since the early 1980s when she showed work by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. A dealer in Middle Eastern and Asian art, she opened a second gallery in Dubai in 2015. “[My mother] was a true artist,” she writes. “The abundant spices, fresh herbs and myriad ingredients were her paints; her sense of smell and taste were her paintbrushes.”

Nahid Joon lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. Her kitchen was designed by her cousin, renowned architect Nasser Ahari. The cabinets were modelled on walnut fittings from their kitchen in Iran, and Nasser fashioned special bronze fixtures for the handles, floral bronze work for the glass doors, and bronze hooks in floral designs above the stove for Nahid Joon to hang her utensils.

Over the years the room played host to many precious memories. Like the marathon cooking sessions that preceded Nahid Joon’s dinner parties for up to 120 when she hooked up her six large rice cookers on the floor throughout the house and played classical music, Persian songs or her favourite singer, Julio Iglesias, as she cooked. Or Thanksgiving dinner when the whole family gathered in that kitchen to cook and Nahid Joon served her Persian-style turkey with cloves and sour cherry rice.

Even the simplest meal became a feast. Heller recalls her son Philip going for dinner one evening and requesting his favourite burgers only to find she had made 12. “I only know how to cook for 12.” Such was her generosity that nothing went to waste. “She wouldn’t just make a chicken thigh for herself. She’d make a whole chicken and give the rest to the doormen,” says Heller. “A bottle of wine too. When the board for the building told her she shouldn’t be giving them alcohol, she started hiding the wine in Perrier bottles.”

The dinners at her daughter’s gallery took off in 2008 when Heller threw an event to coincide with a Chelsea Art Museum show on Iranian art. “It was a last-minute event. I couldn’t arrange catering,” says Heller. “My mother suggested we cook ourselves. She made six dishes: a few rice dishes and stews. I made six, including my famous shrimp salad. We brought them to the gallery.” Dinners in a gallery were rare at the time. Heller’s have since become a regular practice attended by big-name collectors, curators and critics as well as figures such as CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour, a childhood friend. “My mother would call me the next day saying, ‘You’re going to kill me. I can’t do this again.’ But when the time came, she always helped. She loved feeding people.”

It wasn’t just her daughter she cooked with. She cooked with her daughter’s friends too. “My mother’s friendships were multigenerational,” says Heller. “People came for advice and stayed to be fed.”

In 2018, Nahid Joon died after she was hit by a car on the pavement. She was 84 years old. “She left us very suddenly,” Heller says. Nine hundred people attended her memorial, including the doormen. She left behind 150 recipes, all organised, now finally made into a book. “It’s so bittersweet,” says Heller. “I wish she was here. When they sent me the first copy, I said, ‘Mama, this should be you. It’s your book. You made this happen.’ She would have been so excited.” 

Persian Feasts: Recipes & Stories from a Family Table by Leila Heller, with Lila Charif, Laya Khadjavi, and Bahar Tavakolian is published by Phaidon, £34.95

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