In 2017, Hannah Goldberg founded Tanabel, a food-and-events company, in response to the 2016 election. Seeking an outlet for her anger, she had joined a task force at her synagogue devoted to assisting refugees from the Middle East. A culinary-school grad and a professional chef who trained at Jean-Georges and in Europe before a stint in wine and cheese importing, Goldberg organized fund-raising dinners; to support an initiative to supply milk goats to Syrians in a camp in Jordan, she roasted a whole goat.
Soon she began hiring refugees to cook with her, building a business around empowering displaced women by paying them a living wage while spotlighting and preserving their native food cultures, including techniques and recipes passed down through their families. “I met with a lot of the refugee-resettlement agencies,” Goldberg recalled the other day. She was on a search for “a woman who might light up when she talks about food, who just can’t stop feeding people. And they’d be, like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve got one for you, she can’t stop bringing food into the office!’ ”
In addition to a ticketed dinner series, Tanabel’s roster included cooking classes and catering, pop-ups at restaurants, and a stall at the Queens Night Market. The name comes from the Souk el-Tanabel market, in Damascus, where venders hire local women to process fruits and vegetables in their homes so they can be sold ready to cook—tanabel translates to “lazy people.” In April, 2020, the name became even more apt: Goldberg shifted to delivery, and currently offers three-course “dinners for two” and larger-format “feasts” on Thursday and Saturday evenings, respectively, to parts of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.
On a recent Thursday, a startlingly vernal salad—green chickpeas, lightly grilled asparagus, zucchini, and spring onions, and tiny leaves of endive, fresh mint, and watercress on a bed of squash moutabal (a cousin to baba ghanoush)—preceded succulent chunks of skewer-grilled chicken strewn with cherry tomatoes and sautéed red onion, to be spooned over an expansive, fluffy flatbread with cucumber-mint yogurt. For dessert, there was orange-blossom milk pudding, its surface glossy with sour-orange marmalade.
Goldberg’s co-chef that evening was Fatima Kwara, who arrived in New York from Damascus, by way of Jordan, in 2016. A few days later, the pair produced a tahini-themed feast in partnership with Seed + Mill, a tahini-and-halvah brand. Every dish contained tahini, and yet the menu wasn’t remotely repetitive. The ingredient lent a floral note to a creamy, fuchsia-hued yogurt-and-roasted-beet dip, and in a rich sauce it played earthy foil to buttery, pan-roasted cod topped with caramelized onions and fried almonds.
The following Saturday was Nowruz, the Persian New Year. A pre-Nowruz Thursday dinner for two featured a smoky eggplant salad called kal kebab, the bean, greens, and noodle soup ash-e reshteh, and a small cake drizzled in saffron-rose syrup and encrusted with almonds. For Nowruz itself, my delivery bag was like Mary Poppins’s satchel—I could hold it in one hand without effort, and yet somehow it contained enough food to cover a six-foot table, and gorgeously.
Handfuls of fresh herbs were scattered with edible flowers and radishes cut to look like blossoms, to be grazed on with Persian cucumbers, walnuts, wedges of fresh, salty cheese, and a golden oval of barbari, a traditional Iranian flatbread. Crisp yellow-pea fritters came with ruffled leaves of lettuce, for wrapping, and a sweet-sour sauce. The classic Iranian omelette known as kuku sabzi, more herb than egg, was sliced into neat rectangles and garnished with barberries; still more herbs and barberries were stuffed into the cavity of a whole trout. The featured chef was Roya Azhari, who fled Tehran for the U.S. last year. For Nowruz in past years, Goldberg worked with Nasrin Rejali, also from Iran. This year, Rejali was otherwise occupied. Her new company, Nasrin’s Kitchen, was offering a Nowruz feast for delivery, too. (Dinners for two $60; feasts around $135.) ♦
