At Delara in Vancouver, chef Bardia prepares a dish from home — something rooted in memory, tradition, and the rhythms of Nowruz, the Persian New Year. It’s a dish tied to his home, to the sound of his mother chopping herbs with a dull knife, and to the scent of steaming rice filling their kitchen in Tehran.

Bardia grew up visiting Tehran’s Tajrish bazaar, where herbs were piled like small green mountains — dusty, fragrant, alive. He remembers washing them in the kitchen with his mother, the scent of fresh herbs lingering on their hands, and the quiet rituals that shaped their meals.

At 19, he left Iran for Canada. What followed was a path that bent and shifted: studying engineering, working at IBM, building a practical life — and then undoing it. Leaving it. Choosing the unknown.

He and his wife moved to France so he could cook, learn, and start again. Food became the thread that held everything together — a bridge between worlds, between past and present, between what he left behind and what he was learning to create.

He recalls holding his new Canadian passport for the first time — feeling both the ache of what he had lost and the weight of everything he had built since. Cooking, for him, has always been tied to this duality: grief and possibility, memory and reinvention.

Delara is part of that story. A space for Middle Eastern cuisine in Vancouver, built from the ground up. A place where cultures meet, where ingredients feel familiar and new at the same time, where the food is an echo of home and a celebration of what’s possible in a new one.

I loved witnessing Bardia in the kitchen — the joy, and the community. And seeing his aunties cooking in the back made the kitchen feel like home in a true sense.

Photography & Words: Sophia Hsin
Restaurant: DeLara, Vancouver
Chef: Bardia Ilbeiggi