{"id":7591,"date":"2026-10-29T10:29:21","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T09:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/?p=7591"},"modified":"2026-10-31T08:41:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T07:41:27","slug":"ghormeh-sabzi-persian-herb-stew-interlaken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/en\/ghormeh-sabzi-persian-herb-stew-interlaken\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghormeh Sabzi: Iran&#8217;s herb stew in Interlaken"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>.bnu-blog{max-width:760px;margin:0 auto;padding:48px 20px 72px;}.bnu-blog h1{margin:0 0 24px;line-height:1.25;}.bnu-blog h2{margin:34px 0 14px;line-height:1.3;}.bnu-blog p{margin:0 0 18px;line-height:1.65;}.bnu-blog__img{margin:0 0 28px;}.bnu-blog__img img{display:block;width:100%;height:auto;border-radius:8px;}<\/style><article class=\"bnu-blog\" lang=\"en\" data-no-translation data-no-dynamic-translation><h1>Ghormeh Sabzi: Iran&#8217;s herb stew in Interlaken<\/h1><figure class=\"bnu-blog__img\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" src=\"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/ghormeh-sabzi-banoo-interlaken-768x1024.jpg\" srcset=\"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/ghormeh-sabzi-banoo-interlaken-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/ghormeh-sabzi-banoo-interlaken.jpg 1086w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 760px\" width=\"768\" height=\"1024\" alt=\"Ghormeh sabzi at BANOO Interlaken: herb stew with beef and kidney beans in a clay bowl, next to saffron rice with barberries, seen from above\" decoding=\"async\" \/><\/figure><p>Ask Iranians which dish tastes most like home and many will give you the same answer: ghormeh sabzi (say &#8222;ghor-meh sab-zee&#8220;). This deep green herb stew is often called Iran&#8217;s national dish, and in many families the recipe is handed down from one generation to the next. At <a href=\"\/en\/\">BANOO on Centralstrasse 28<\/a> in Interlaken it is No. 36 on our menu, and No. 41 is the vegetarian version. Here is what goes into the pot, where the name comes from, and how to eat it.<\/p><h2>What is ghormeh sabzi?<\/h2><p><em>Sabzi<\/em> is Persian for herbs, the green stuff. <em>Ghormeh<\/em> is an old kitchen word borrowed from Turkish; it once meant meat that was fried and kept in its own fat. Put together, it means something like &#8222;meat with herbs&#8220;. Ghormeh sabzi is a <em>khoresh<\/em>, one of the Persian braised dishes that are always eaten with rice, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica lists it among the main khoresh cooked in Iran today.<\/p><p>It starts with a mountain of finely chopped herbs: mostly parsley, coriander and chives or spring onions. The smell that makes it ghormeh sabzi comes from fenugreek leaves. The herbs are fried slowly in oil until they turn almost black-green and the whole kitchen smells of them. Only then do they go into the pot with the meat, which is already braising with onion and turmeric. Red kidney beans go in too, and so do dried limes, <em>limoo omani<\/em>. The limes are pierced and cooked whole. They give the stew its tangy, slightly earthy sourness, quite different from fresh lime juice.<\/p><p>After that it mostly needs time. Traditionally ghormeh sabzi simmers for several hours over a low flame, until the meat is tender and the sauce is thick and dark. It is not spicy. It tastes of herbs, a little sour and a little earthy, and plenty of people say it is even better the next day.<\/p><p>In Iran it is eaten with <em>chelow<\/em>, fluffy saffron rice, and if you are lucky, a piece of <em>tahdig<\/em>: the golden, crunchy crust of rice from the bottom of the pot that everyone at the family table wants.<\/p><h2>How old is it?<\/h2><p>You will often read that ghormeh sabzi is thousands of years old. The beans tell a different story: kidney beans come from the Americas and only reached Europe after 1492, so the stew as we know it today must be younger. The oldest known written recipes appear in Persian cookbooks of the 19th century. Sour stews of meat and herbs, though, are much older in Persia; cookbooks from the 16th century already describe them.<\/p><p>One more story we like: in February 2024 the Iranian-American NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli shared ghormeh sabzi with her crew on the International Space Station. Hard to eat your favourite dish much further from home than that.<\/p><h2>How we serve ghormeh sabzi at BANOO<\/h2><p>Our ghormeh sabzi is a herb stew with beef and kidney beans in a green herb and lime sauce, served with saffron rice. If you don&#8217;t eat meat, order the vegetarian version with kidney beans (No. 41). <a href=\"\/en\/halal\/\">All our meat is halal.<\/a> We do not use alcohol in our cooking.<\/p><p>Our tip: don&#8217;t pour all the stew over the rice at once. In Iran people put a few spoonfuls of stew next to the rice and eat the two together with a spoon, bite by bite. In Iranian homes, where the stew is cooked with whole dried limes, many people gently press the softened lime with the spoon for a little extra sourness; the lime itself is usually not eaten.<\/p><p>If you are two or more, pair ghormeh sabzi with something from the grill, such as our <a href=\"\/en\/koobideh-persian-kebab-interlaken\/\">kubideh<\/a>. That way you get both sides of Persian cooking on one table: the slow-cooked stew and the skewer straight off the grill.<\/p><h2>Persian food in the centre of Interlaken<\/h2><p>If you are wondering what to eat in Interlaken after a day on the Jungfrau, the Harder or the lake, a stew that has simmered for hours is a good answer, especially on cool autumn and winter evenings.<\/p><p>BANOO is the only Persian restaurant in the Canton of Bern. You&#8217;ll find us at Centralstrasse 28, 2 minutes on foot from H\u00f6heweg and Interlaken West station. With 100 seats we have room for families, <a href=\"\/en\/gruppen\/\">groups<\/a> and walk-ins, and our <a href=\"\/en\/menu\/\">menu<\/a> has plenty of vegetarian dishes. Our sister restaurant is Banoo in Rapperswil.<\/p><p>We are open Tuesday to Sunday, 12:00\u201322:00, and closed on Mondays. <a href=\"https:\/\/pos.banoo-interlaken.ch\/book\/1\">Book a table online<\/a> at <a href=\"https:\/\/pos.banoo-interlaken.ch\/book\/1\">https:\/\/pos.banoo-interlaken.ch\/book\/1<\/a> or call us on <a href=\"tel:+41765007142\">076 500 71 42<\/a>. We look forward to welcoming you.<\/p><p>More from our blog: <a href=\"\/en\/koobideh-persian-kebab-interlaken\/\">Kubideh, the Persian kebab<\/a> and <a href=\"\/en\/persian-mezze-starters-interlaken\/\">Mezze, six Persian starters to share<\/a>.<\/p><\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ghormeh sabzi, Iran&#8217;s famous herb stew with beef, kidney beans and saffron rice. Vegetarian version too. At BANOO, Centralstrasse 28, Interlaken.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7589,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7593,"href":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7591\/revisions\/7593"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banoo-interlaken.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}