Tash, DC

Venturing out of northwest DC into the Capitol Hill area of northeast, I stumbled upon an Iranian restaurant with a lot of flare. Tash fuses American, Iranian, and Middle Eastern cultures into a unique style of cuisine. From the outside, its orange brick and orange chairs bring about feelings of warmth and as you step inside, the same feeling is transferred with warm, dark wood booths and walls accented with sparkly orange ceiling lamps and funky stone tiling.

We walked in on a busy Saturday night without reservations and had a 20-minute wait or so before we were seated in a nice booth near the bar. We started with cocktails. I ordered the Beerbourbon sour, which was delightful.  It had whiskey, lemon juice, marmalade, bitters, Triple Sec, and white ale.

 

I noticed that there was only one menu item marked vegan so I inquired about the other items that appeared to be vegan. There are actually several appetizers that are vegan like the olive dip, hummus, baba ganoush, and mirza (eggplant) so we started with the hummus. It only came with one large piece of bread. I'd say the hummus was very good and the bread was excellent as well. You could really tell that the flatbread was baked in a charcoal fire brick grill as you could taste that authentic firey crispness.

For my entree, I ordered the one item marked as vegan -- the Gheymeh Eggplant.  This stew was made up of yellow split peas that surrounded oily eggplant in a tomato sauce. It was bursting with flavor (and oil) and was very good. My only complaint is that the saffron rice it normally comes with is cooked with butter so it isn't vegan. Why do they point out that this is a vegan dish with saffron rice if the rice isn't vegan?  They gave me flatbread instead, which I was happy with.

My friend ordered the Fire Grilled Vegetables, which can also be made vegan.  It was just vegetables and rice (again not vegan), but these vegetables were grilled in such a way that they too were bursting with flavor. There was zucchini, eggplant, and potatoes. Besides being incredibly oily, they were excellent.

So all in all, for a place I didn't research ahead of time, I thought we stumbled upon some pretty good food. The service was a bit slow as they were very busy, but the drinks and food made up for that. The stew was only $8 while the vegetable dish was only $12 so the prices were on the low end, in my opinion. I just hope in the future, they label the rice as not vegan and label all vegan items as vegan.

Tash
524 8th Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
(202) 733-1133