Best of New York 2014 • Eating

• Taste of Persia

  12 W. 18th St., nr. Fifth Ave.; 917-592-3467

  Calling it soup doesn’t do it. Ditto stew. The Persian dish known as ash-e reshteh lives somewhere indescribably in between, transcending both. Beans, spinach, herbs, a few broken strands of linguine, all transformed into a super-vegetal mush and topped with crisp bits of onion, garlic, and dried mint, plus the yogurt-like condiment called kashk: It has the cooked-down comfort-food appeal of a bowl of Italian ribollita combined with the spice complexity of a well-calibrated Indian dal. Polar vortices have been known to cower in its presence.

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