At the moment, it’s a café in the most spartan sense of the word. There are a couple of tables, bare walls, and not much else. Plans to enlarge and add more polish are in the future, but the business is focused purely on the food for the moment. As evidenced by a steady stream of customers picking up orders at Sulaiman’s Café, which recently opened in St. Ann, that’s a reasonable plan.
The parents of Sulaiman (both the establishment and their little boy, who shares a name with the café) are Bangladeshi university students, both working on teaching degrees but with every intention of making a go of a restaurant featuring the fare of Bangladesh. The location most recently housed the original home of Bombay Food Junkies, the extraordinary Indian tiffins restaurant that found a new home in Creve Coeur. Sulaiman’s shares the same St. Ann strip mall as the legendary Sweet Spot Café. It’s another welcome addition to the increasingly international dining scene in this area of northwest county.
Find the best food in St. Louis
Subscribe to the St. Louis Dining In and Dining Out newsletters to stay up-to-date on the local restaurant and culinary scene.
Bangladesh, situated between India and Myanmar, has been a crossroads of civilization for millennia, with a wide array of culinary influences. The default assumption is that Bangladeshi food is a regional variation on Indian cuisine, and there’s some truth to that. Sulaiman Café has chicken biryani on the menu, along with chicken or paneer tikka masala, kormas, and curries. (The lunch special—chicken or beef curry, chicken tikka, and goat korma, with a selection of dalsis for $8—is what’s drawing many customers.)
We were interested, however, in what’s distinctively Bangladeshi at Sulaiman’s, which is how we ended up tucking into beef teheri. Teheri are a particular version of biryani—instead of yogurt or another creamy ingredient, it’s cooked in vegetable oil and tastes leaner, with more concentrated flavor. Teheri became popular in the region after World War II, when meat was at a premium. A little protein gets stretched a long way; the chunks of beef in the dish were so thoroughly cooked, we couldn’t identify the cut of the meat. But curried beautifully, it was tender, moist, and tossed into a basmati rice that was lemony bright, with that faint tanginess that’s so delectably characteristic of the starch.
What we really wanted to try was the classic Bangladesh dish morog polao. Think of it as a kind of smothered chicken (and by “smothered,” we mean marinated, as it’s cooked in a whole spice shop’s worth of ingredients). It resembles a plate of chicken biryani, but there are important differences. A leg and thigh are slow-cooked (and by “slow-cooked,” we mean overnight). Pulverized cashews add a subtle nuttiness, but cardamom (the delectable but difficult to pin down taste you’ll notice), ginger, nutmeg, and luscious ghee also play parts.
Bangladeshi meals feature complex seasonings and long cooking times. Connoisseurs like to say the cuisine is more intensely spiced than other subcontinent cuisines. Maybe that’s not so much the case as it is prepared in such a way that individual flavorings retain their distinctive tastes. In that sense, it’s much like Thai food, in which flavors work less in an organized concert and more as individual harmonies. Morog polao is to chicken biryani, for instance, as improvisational jazz is to extemporization—Ornette Coleman to Oscar Peterson, if you get our drift.
The “polao” part is pilaf. It’s hard to imagine a word that has more iterations scattered over a larger expanse of the planet. From Turkmenistan to Mumbai, the Caucasus to the Himalayas, it’s pilaf, plov, polao, and a dozen other variants. Some genius figured a way to flavor rice with spices or meat, and it spread through Asia Minor and Major. As with the teheri, it’s basmati rice, which cooks up fluffier and drier than other rice varieties. The result is an accompaniment to the chicken, with that faint aromatic perfume that sends the dish to another level.
Aside from the bare-bones atmosphere, Styrofoam clamshell, and plastic cutlery, remember that you’re eating a time-tested dish with origins halfway around the globe. While a tiny storefront joint on a side street in St. Ann might seem an unlikely place to engage with such a storied cuisine, maybe that’s part of the allure.
