BK 50
POUYA ESGHAI & SIAVASH KARAMPOUR
Owners, Masquerade
Jun 14, 2022
Masquerade, a tapas bar that serves Iranian treats for under $12 in Williamsburg, is a lively, relaxing spot that harks back to the sort of Brooklyn that social media has all but ruined. The excitement sparked by simply walking through the doors comes directly from co-owners Pouya Esghai and Siavash Karampour, who are both from Tehran and are just as fun and down-to-earth as the spot they’ve built.
Hoping to create, in their words, “an imaginary Tehran” that blends 1970s Iran with present-day New York “with an element of Mardi Gras thrown in,” the duo is quick to note the difficulty involved in standing out amid a number of new Iranian restaurants that have recently landed on the scene. But they have risen to the challenge by offering their vision of a pre-revolutionary yet modern Iran evoked via food, cocktails and ambiance.
“The traditional Persian restaurants are outdated,” Karampour told Brooklyn Magazine earlier this year. “They don’t cater to the modern tastes of the young Iranians. The dishes are so cliché — kabobs, kabobs and kabobs. The newer generation feels the need to have a better representation in terms of taste, especially in New York.” Be sure to try the creamy kashk o bademjoon eggplant dip and the fresenjoon meatball stew.
This life-affirming culinary expression comes against a backdrop of tragedy. Esghai and Karampour came to the U.S. as members of the underground rock group The Yellow Dogs, which sought asylum (and freedom) here in 2010. Iran is a country notoriously hostile to their kind of music. By 2013 the band had become a fixture in the local music scene when violence found them anyway: a deranged rival musician, also from Iran, killed two of the group’s members in a murder- suicide that claimed the lives of four. Esghai was there and survived unscathed. Karampour, luckily, was out of town at the time.
The two have since put their rock star dreams on ice, focusing instead on manifesting the Tehran they’d love to see in the world — right here in Brooklyn. Masquerade opened in October 2021, because the two had nothing else to do, they said. There had been a pandemic; they were underemployed. “We always wanted to open our own bar,” they told Greenpointers in May.
Freedom never tasted better.