He closed Zaika in 2015 after getting married and having a child, but returned to the Old Capitol Center in 2020, this time with his wife Shahana Sulthana as his partner. This led him to open his first restaurant, an Indian restaurant called Zaika in the Old Capitol Town Center in 2008.
He moved to the United States in the late ’90s and began working in restaurants, including Taste of India in Cedar Rapids, while he attended Kirkwood Community College. So on Saturday, when we didn’t feel like cooking, we fell back on what we knew we’d enjoy and ordered from Bollywood Grill.īollywood Grill is a newcomer to the Iowa City area, having opened this summer, but owner Zameer Khan is far from a beginner. Both familiar but always something new, Indian food has remained a staple of my takeout diet ever since that first meal over 20 years ago. Even the textures were new and different.īecause I’ve never learned to satisfactorily duplicate those flavors in my kitchen, some of the wonder and excitement remains to this day, no matter how often I eat it. There were unfamiliar ingredients - I didn’t know what cardamom or even turmeric were then - but the food was vibrantly colorful and fragrant in a way that I hadn’t experienced before.
I tried Indian food for the first when I was in my teens and I still remember it being a transporting experience. Growing up in Iowa in the ’80s and ’90s, a time when the restaurant landscape was dominated by corporate chains, I didn’t have much exposure to food from other parts of the world.