The other day, while shopping for dried figs and pink, plum-soaked sesame seeds at the East Village spice store SOS Chefs, I asked the baker and cookbook author Bryan Ford where in the city he’d go for a baguette or a croissant. “I wouldn’t!” Ford, who is thirty-six, barrel-chested, and bearded, with a propensity for four-letter words, said, laughing. “That’s just not what I crave.” Born in the Bronx and raised in New Orleans, Ford specializes in breads that can be harder to find in New York: sourdough pan de coco (soft, sweet dinner rolls made with coconut milk, a staple in his parents’ native Honduras); conchas and other Mexican pan dulce; pan chapla, an anise-scented Peruvian loaf that is leavened with chicha de jora, a fermented corn beverage. I first met him in 2023, when he served me a phenomenal alfajor—a sandwich cookie made with shortbread and dulce de leche—at the Family Reunion, the chef Kwame Onwuachi’s annual food festival; for a while, he baked bread for Tatiana, Onwuachi’s acclaimed restaurant at Lincoln Center. Last year, Ford published “Pan y Dulce,” a follow-up to his first cookbook, “New World Sourdough” (2020). Both books are part of his mission to “decolonize the baking world,” as he sometimes puts it, by showcasing the breadth and complexity of Latin American and Caribbean baking.
Also last year, Ford and his wife, Bridget Kenna—whom he met when she produced his first TV show, “The Artisan’s Kitchen”—left New York for Florida. They were preparing for the arrival of their first child, and Ford had previously lived in Miami, where he baked at a beloved local shop called El Bagel and sold jalá (also known as challah) on the side. So I was surprised when Ford called, over the summer, to tell me that he and Kenna were returning to the city, and that he’d be opening a bakery in Brooklyn Heights. I was even more surprised when he told me that it would be an Afghan bakery, called Diljān.
New York is in a golden age of baked goods. A decade ago, it was a cliché for New Yorkers to visit Paris and come back yearning for that city’s corner boulangeries, which casually sold baguettes that were leagues beyond anything you’d find in the boroughs. Today, even if New York hasn’t matched Paris’s density of excellent options, it has seen a flourishing of superlative baking. In the early twenty-tens, Brooklyn bakeries such as She Wolf and Bien Cuit inaugurated a wave of prestige bread, proffering expertly crafted sourdough loaves. During the pandemic, a number of out-of-work professional bakers started selling bread and pastries out of their home kitchens; more than one eventually turned their quarantine hustle into a brick-and-mortar business. Now a town that used to apologize for its croissants boasts hours-long lines for them: both the West Village and Brooklyn Heights locations of L’Appartement 4F, a game-changing French bakery, are consistently mobbed with people seeking pâtisserie, baguettes, and fifty-dollar boxes of breakfast cereal made of tiny, hand-rolled croissants.
As the city’s bakeries have grown increasingly culturally specific, representing far-flung cuisines and styles—see Librae, in the East Village, which deploys Danish techniques and Middle Eastern ingredients like za’atar and black lime—they have also leaned into the culinary identity of New York. Radio Bakery, a spinoff of a Ridgewood restaurant called Rolo’s, sells bacon-egg-and-cheese focaccia by the slice; Elbow Bread, inspired by the Jewish history of the Lower East Side, offers a challah croissant and a buckwheat latte.
Perhaps none is as specific as Diljān. Ford’s partners in the business are Ali Zaman and Mohamed Ghiasi, a pair of Afghan American restaurateurs. Zaman, who is thirty, and Ghiasi, who is twenty-eight, went to the same high school in Queens, as did their fathers, who are veterans of the local restaurant industry. In 2021, the younger Zaman and Ghiasi opened Little Flower, a halal coffee shop in Astoria, which became a beloved haunt of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who also frequents Zaman’s father’s restaurant, Sami’s Kabab House. Ford, who lived in Astoria, was a regular at Little Flower, too, and Zaman and Ghiasi enlisted him to revamp the café’s pastry menu, devising items such as a jalapeño-cheddar tart with halal beef bacon. When the pair decided to open Diljān, where they planned to focus on naan-e panjayi—the chewy, yeasty Afghan flatbread that they’d grown up eating—Ford was their first call.
Diljān, on Hicks Street, is not far from the formidable queues of L’Appartement 4F, but it’s even closer to a stretch of Atlantic Avenue where Lebanese and Syrian immigrants flocked in the middle of the twentieth century, after the decline of Manhattan’s Little Syria. The street is dotted with time-tested Middle Eastern businesses, including the spare but inviting Yemen Café, with its steaming platters of slow-roasted lamb and self-serve dispenser of sweet milky tea, and the grocery store Sahadi’s, which still uses take-a-number deli tickets to fill orders for dried fruit and nuts by the pound.
Zaman and Ghiasi—a former theatre actor and a real-estate developer, respectively—have a talent for riffing on classic New York tropes. After Little Flower, they opened a halal fast-food counter called Blue Hour inside a gas station in Bushwick; the interior of Diljān, with its crimson tiles and stainless-steel counter, is meant to evoke both the Afghan flag and the sidewalk coffee carts that their fathers used to operate. “I think people just think Afghan food is, like, kabab, and it’s way more than that,” Zaman told me. Standing behind the counter, Ford handed me a slab of puffy, finger-pocked golden bread, its shiny surface flecked with sesame and nigella seeds, to be eaten with a pair of cream-cheese dips. One was speckled with chopped beef bacon and scallion. The other was blended with sour-cherry jam, inspired by a simple breakfast of Zaman and Ghiasi’s childhoods. (Their parents would substitute Philadelphia for the clotted cream they might have had in Afghanistan.)
In Afghan cuisine, naan-e panjayi is ubiquitous, as likely to appear in a breakfast spread as it is to be served with stews and roasts at dinner. Before signing on to Diljān, Ford had never made it. He started by researching what kind of wheat grows in Afghanistan. From American mills, Ford sourced flours stone-ground from varietals similar to those most commonly found in Afghanistan and began experimenting, vetting each iteration of the bread with Zaman, Ghiasi, and their families. Zaman and Ghiasi gave notes on how wheaty they wanted it to taste (very); Sami, Zaman’s father, would tell Ford if it was too thick or too salty. The rows of dimples, Ford told me, are supposed to be as straight as arrows. “I’m still working on that,” he added.
The dimples, and the bread’s oblong shape, give it a passing resemblance to focaccia, though Ford seemed to find the comparison reductive. “It might remind me of a focaccia because I learned how to make focaccia first, but that’s just part of the system we’re trying to break, right?” he said. “There are so many Italian and French bakeries because that’s the standard, but I think there should be more people being immersed in this kind of baking.” Ford hopes to distinguish Diljān by prioritizing tradition over hype. “We won’t be selling anything that we call a croissant,” he said, though he acknowledged that “any bakery that’s doing well” is selling pâtisserie. “People just love that shit,” he continued. “So what do we do? We use Afghan flavors. We didn’t want to do a pistachio-rose”—a Middle Eastern combination that has already become a cliché of trendy pastry. “It has to be deeper,” he said, assessing a tray of laminated confections. One, shaped in a more defined crescent than that of a typical croissant, curved like the emblem of the Ottoman Empire; Ford piped it full of the pale-yellow pastry cream that gave it its name, the Saffron Shah. From a small tray of sheer pira—Afghan milk fudge, made with cardamom and orange-blossom water—he used a cookie cutter to extract glossy circles to fit into a Danish-like pastry, between layers of a vanilla pastry cream and diplomat cream. The texture of the finished product was delightfully riotous, shards of crisp golden crumb collapsing into the pleasingly claggy fudge and luscious custard.
Using a smaller, circular version of the naan-e panjayi, Ford began to assemble a matryoshka doll of carbs, stuffing the bread with a Jamaican-style patty that was in turn stuffed with a spiced potato mixture typically found inside bolani (a deep-fried Afghan flatbread), plus spoonfuls of green chutney and white sauce. It was a clever homage to the iconic beef-patty-on-coco-bread sandwich, popular in the Caribbean neighborhoods of the North Bronx, and beloved by all three Diljān co-founders. “It’s a New York staple!” Ghiasi said proudly. Zaman observed that their partnership felt natural in part because Afghan cuisine is itself a fusion. “It’s the melting pot of Asia, Central Asia,” Zaman said. “We have all these different influences: India, China, the Soviet Union, Iran.” New York was an obvious counterpart. “My dad loves conchas. My dad fucking loves bagels,” Zaman said, recalling his father’s coffee-cart days. “He was selling bagels and cream cheese. Cinnamon-raisin was his shit.”
Zaman and Ghiasi have hopes of greatly expanding their business; talking to them reminded me of the short-lived HBO comedy “How to Make It in America,” about a pair of ballsy young guys hustling to break into the fashion industry. But their ambition is imbued with an endearing vulnerability. “A big thing that I always talk about, just in my own life, is being an Afghan New Yorker,” Zaman told me. “You’re a kid, 9/11 happens, and you’re both sides of your identity. I’m Afghan and now there’s war with Afghanistan, but I’m also a New Yorker, and this tragedy happened. Growing up, you feel a little embarrassed that you’re Muslim. And now, I keep joking, it’s Zohran’s New York, it’s cool to be Muslim again. It’s, like, the coolest thing.” ♦
