The building on Manor Way near Love Field looks like it might be a mechanic shop, and that’s because it also used to be one. Abdol Samad Afghanipour ran both operations out of the same address for years — auto repair on one side, Persian food on the other — and if that sounds like an unlikely combination, it made complete sense to a man who came to Dallas from Iran in 1982 with a simple plan: work hard at whatever needed doing and eventually open a restaurant. He opened Samad Cafe at 2706 Manor Way in 1989. He has been running it alone ever since.
Alone is not a figure of speech. Samad, who is 84 years old, arrives at 7 in the morning to begin cooking. By 11:30 a.m. he opens the door. He is the chef, the server, and the cashier — what his son Amir Bagshahi calls a “one-man show,” which understates the thing somewhat. Every dish that comes out of the kitchen was made that morning, from scratch, by the same man who will bring it to your table, ask if the kebab is cooked to your liking, and then go back to the kitchen to finish someone else’s order. For nearly four decades, this is how it worked, and for most of those four decades, the people who knew about Samad Cafe were the ones who happened to live nearby, or the ones who were lucky enough to be told.
The menu that earned all of this attention is not complicated. Six dishes plus daily specials — the kind of focused menu that comes from someone who decided long ago exactly what they were going to make and never saw a reason to change it. The lamb shank is the dish that stops first-timers in their tracks — slow-braised until the meat falls from the bone, served with rice and the unmistakable warmth of Persian spicing. The koobideh kebab, ground beef seasoned and grilled over open flame, and the joojeh kebab, white meat chicken marinated and cooked the same way, come with white rice or baghali polo — green rice fragrant with dried dill and lima beans — or a combination of both.
The ghormeh sabzi, the herb and kidney bean stew that is one of the foundational dishes of Persian cooking, appears as a special and disappears quickly. Every day of the week has its own rotation — lamb on certain days, beef chunks on others, chicken quarters in between — and the Thursday special is a beef, eggplant, and lentil stew that regulars plan their week around.
For serious lamb enthusiasts, there is a $50 special requiring 48 hours notice: lamb head, two lamb feet, and two lamb tongues, the whole-animal preparation that exists at the far end of the menu and tells you something important about how seriously this kitchen takes the tradition it’s working in. Samad himself has been described as bringing out the kebabs to the table to verify they’re cooked to your liking before returning to the kitchen — not as a performance, but because that’s how he has always done it.
“This restaurant, a small restaurant, is not fancy,” Samad said when the cameras arrived. “But the food is excellent. It’s fresh. I make it early in the morning every day.” That is the whole review, from the chef himself, and it is entirely accurate. The room seats a handful of tables. There is outdoor seating. Dogs are welcome. The prices belong to a different era of Dallas dining. And the man who has been cooking there for 36 years will probably bring your food out himself, ask if everything is all right, and mean it.
Open Monday through Friday 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., closed Sunday. (214) 350-6311.
