Stone Stew 1 (Dizi Sangi) — Restaurant in San Jose

I live only a couple of blocks away from this place and had never seen it before. The restaurant is located in a small complex on the Saratoga Ave road and the entrance to this place is through a convenience store (the most unexpected entrance I have ever seen). If it wasn't for yelp, I would have not even known of this place!

The moment you step into the restaurant, it feels like you are in a different part of the world all together. The place is decorated very authentically, each corner you look at will have something new and different belonging to the Persian culture/community. (I think for a good 30 mins I was only marveling at the beauty and rawness of the place)

I went there on a late Saturday afternoon, the place was quite empty given the timing we went at. The staff members were very quick in taking our order and checked with us couple of times if we were doing okay there. The menu is pretty vast, best part is they have shareable menu items-food plates for 2 (and you can customize what you want in there).

I had ordered the Jajrood Chicken Kabab which came with rice and grilled tomato and little side of cabbage salad. They ask you for chicken if you want chicken breast or thigh (its great to have the option of picking which one you want). My friend got the Lamb and Beef skewer with sides.

The food came in good quantity, well presented. The rice were steamed really well and had saffron in them as well which tasted great! The tomato was grilled well. My friend really enjoyed his skewers, the lamb was soft and well cooked. The chicken skewers were hit or miss. Some pieces were really well cooked and tasted great but once or twice there were instances where I could feel it was not cooked very nicely. The marination was great, very flavorful and was neither too spicy, nor too bland.

Highlight: It was so cool, I realized it after 5 mins of staring at the menu-The menu opens from back to the front, the dessert items are in the front and the main course starts...

We had guests and took them over Stone Stew for Friday night dinner, service was slow, they didn’t pour water in our glasses, the waitress didn’t ask what we like to drink ... they brought basil and raw onion as starter/service I asked about cheese (Persian traditional starter goes with basil )the waitress said it would be 4.99 if we want to have it , this is an Iranian restaurant so having raw onion and basil to start sounds strange! food portion was small, we got Ghormeh sabzi and Gheimeh which was Really small , and not fresh AT ALL ,for 14.99 Stew was not ok! Then jojeh and Koubideh they were poor in quality, no design for foods, while we were eating they stopped by 2 times to clean our table and we kept saying that still we ate working on our food! They didn’t check on us that is everything ok or do we need anything! When we get done I waved couple of times to get their attention to order dessert, after ordering it took them half an hour for dessert to show up! No smile from waitress , you could see staff are under pressure and stress! When she gave us dessert she put 7 spoons in one of our hands ( meaning: distribute them)!!!! We were 4 and she could have give us 4 spoons and put each spoon beside dessert, but of course she didn’t! We dined there before and we knew service wouldn’t be the greatest but this was super slow, for every little thing we kept asking, for water, napkin, our soda, this that...unfortunately I should say we won’t go back. This place was nice before but new owner/management apparently won’t care anymore. We had good memories back at couple of years ago, good quality and environment was...

Great food but terrible service. Im not sure how to reply to the owners comment below so I'll update my review here and elaborate on what I mean by terrible service. I have been to this place around 10 or 15 times. Over weekdays as well as weekends for lunch as well as dinner. I've been here when there's only three tables to wait and when it's completely packed. And regardless of the time the service has always been consistently bad. after we sit down there is usually about a 10-minute wait for someone to come bring our water or napkin and cutleries. then there is another 20 minutes of wait before I can make eye contact with one of the waitresses to come and take our order.I usually just turn around on my seat for a continuous 15 minutes or 20 minutes just to try to make eye contact with one of the waiters or waitresses and it's very difficult because they just don't look at you they are not looking at the tables they're busy doing other things. often I have to actually get off of my chair go to the kitchen call someone and ask for them to come to our table I have had to do this several times at this restaurant. and once you order you better order everything that you thought of you would need if you want extra bread just say it at the time because if you need something after you have ordered it's also very difficult to get a hold of them and ask them for something. The staff is nice and smiling but only if you catch their eyes. I hope I've clarified what I meant by bad service. It's consistently great food though and that's why we keep...