About Hidden Eats
Follow our staff writer Ike Allen as he scopes out under-the-radar mom-and-pop restaurants around the DMV, from Hyattsville to Herndon and beyond.
location_on736 Rockville Pike, Rockville
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As a kid, Navid Nasseri ran a sort of analog version of Instacart in his Tehran neighborhood. The nine-year-old would go door to door taking down lists of what his neighbors wanted from local markets. Then he’d deliver them on his bike, tacking on a percentage to make it worth his while.
Years later, Nasseri’s family moved to the US, and he began working in construction after high school. But the grocery business, he says, was still in his system. In 2013, Navid sold his brother Nasser, a rheumatologist, on the idea of opening a store together. They hired three employees and launched Gourmet Bazaar in Rockville’s Woodmont Station strip mall.
Three years ago, they moved a mile up the road to their current location, a major upgrade. Walking through the aisles is like getting a tour of Iranian cuisine: borage petals; chicory water; crisp bunches of dill and mint; dried plums, dates, and oleaster fruit so rich they have to be refrigerated; eye-catching displays of roasted nuts and melon seeds; and huge scrolls of freshly baked flatbread.
But at lunchtime, most customers walk straight past all this to the prepared-food counter.
There’s a pan of ash reshteh, a vernal soup of beans, greens, and noodles, topped with dried mint, fried onions, and strained yogurt. You can also find many traditional Persian meat stews, each of which incorporates its own artful juxtaposition of ingredients, such as gheimeh (split peas, tomatoes, and dried limes), ghormeh sabzi (dark greens, fenugreek leaves, and kidney beans), and fesenjan (walnuts and pomegranate molasses). They all come with rice and the most irresistible bite in Iranian cooking: tahdig, the crispy rice from the bottom of the pot.
The ground-meat koobideh kebab is worth a try too, but what sets Gourmet Bazaar’s hot-food counter apart is how deep it ventures into the Iranian home-cooking catalog.
“Anybody can go and get kebab,” Nasseri says, “but if you ever wanted to get some kind of stew before, you had to call around and see if anybody’s running any specials.”
Gourmet Bazaar packages both stews and kebabs in unusual and somewhat unwieldy shoebox-like containers that will make you feel as if you’re bringing home something expensive from a department store.
The place also excels at representing Iran’s syncretic sandwich culture. You can order a soft sub roll filled with mortadella, slices of kuku sabzi (a verdant herb frittata), or dollops of mayo-and-potato-based Olivier salad. Another sandwich option is the sosis bandari, a tangy fry-up of sausage, peppers, and onions that was invented in a Persian Gulf port city but reminded me of a sub I once ate at an Italian deli in Philadelphia. On that same note, the grill cooks here also make a surprisingly great cheesesteak.
The war in Iran has brought obvious logistical challenges for a shop that sources more than 6,000 Middle Eastern products, many of which are shipped through the United Arab Emirates.
“For the time being, we have enough, but I have no idea what’s going to happen two or three months from now,” Nasseri says.
Some Iranian Americans hope the war will bring about a regime change, but Nasseri says the prevailing mood among his customers is painful uncertainty. Because of the internet blackout in Iran, he can’t communicate with his family there. But the conflict does seem to have brought Nasseri’s customers closer together.
“My Persian customers, they’re not happy at all,” Nasseri says, “and our American customers, they all tell me that they’re sorry that this has happened to Iran.”
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Washingtonian.
Ike Allen covers politics, food, culture, and transportation in DC and writes the monthly Hidden Eats column for the magazine. He grew up in DC.
