How was your meal at Mehran's?

It started as a joke. And lasted as a joke for a good long time. Before it ended as a magnificent performance art hack of a joke.

A group of 20-something techies were bunking together in a NY Upper East Side (UES) brownstone - sixteen Gen-Z-ers sharing  4BR digs. If my arithmetic holds, that's four occupants per bedroom, which means these kiddos were literally bunking on bunkbeds. Some were event sleeping in closets.

Sixteen folks sharing four bedrooms? Sounds god-awful, but this is something of the norm for young folks in Manhattan, especially those on temporary gigs.

A friend has a niece who's been working in NYC since she graduated from Tufts a year ago. She's only there for a couple of years, doing some lab thing as she applies to med school. But while she's there, she's in a one bedroom flat, sleeping in half of the living room, with some sort of curtain rigged up to separate her space from that of one of her roommates. The roomie whose name is on the lease gets the bedroom.

Anyway, one of the UES Brownstone Sixteen, Danielle Egan, decided to rename their address on Google Maps. She did so in honor of her housemate Mehran Jalali, who regularly cooked steaks for communal dinners, naming their place Mehran's Steak House.

A week after the listing was posted in March 2022, Mr. Jalali, now 21, said, “A couple walked in like, ‘We’re here for the steak.’” The roommates turned them away, but their listed phone number rang off the hook. The friends toyed with the idea of opening a real restaurant, and Mr. [Riley] Walz, also 21, built a website with a waiting list. (Source: NY Times)

And then it was just a matter of a few clicks to compose some joke reviews. One joke review led to another, and before you knew it, Mehran's was the highest rated steakhouse on the UES, with:

...a near-perfect Google rating, with 91 glowing reviews: “Best steak I have ever had in NY,” “Words cannot explain how phenomenal the steak was” and “Chef Mehran is a genius-god among men.”

One reviewer claimed that, thanks to Mehran's, he'd converted from veganism.  

With those glowing reviews, folks start signing up to get on the waiting list for reservations. 

Yet few diners have been lucky enough to land a reservation. Mehran’s website and voice mail state that the restaurant, on East 83rd Street in Manhattan, is fully booked for months, an irresistible challenge for New Yorkers who treat reservation-hunting like a professional sport.

Pretty soon, Mehran's had a waiting list with over 2,000 experience-seeking carnivores on it, waiting for the Godot of a table to open up. 

Meanwhile, there were some suspicious minds starting to poke around looking for the mysterious steakhouse. Figuring that the jig would soon be up, the housemates - most of them having decamped to the other Coast - "decided it was time to give the restaurant a go."

They booked an event space in the East Village, contacted people from the online waiting list of more than 900, and did some market research.

“We put our money together to go to two steakhouses, one big and one small, to see what they were like.” At STK and &Son, the friends quizzed waiters about restaurant and server logistics.

They developed a four-course menu ($114 before tax, tip and wine), and asked the chef Elias Bikahi of Le Sandwich to taste and critique their dishes.

Late this summer, staffed by 60 friends of Jalali, Walz, and Egan, Mehran's had a one night stand. 

It wasn't all that high end a staff. 

Almost none of the volunteers had any cooking experience, and were randomly assigned prep work by Mr. Walz and Mr. Jalali. As Anson Yu, a pescatarian, patted dry 114 pounds of rib-eyes, Mr. Jalali asked the team, “Do the steaks get seasoned before or after the sear?”

But this was such a great Gen-Z opportunity.

Ms. Yu, an engineering intern, flew from Montreal just for the occasion. “People are terminally online and constantly watching other people live lives,” she said, and “when people, like Riley and Mehran, are high-agency, it attracts people like moths.”

And, in a true case of "if they build it, they will come" it wasn't just fake staff who showed up. So did diners. Some had been on the waiting list for nearly a year, and when they got the call that there was a table, they grabbed it.

The menu purported to follow the life cycle of a cow. As diners at the pop-up’s 35 tables tucked into courses like Meadows Bring Life (a mixed green salad), Youth: Ever Precious, Ever Fleeting (veal meatballs) and Agrarian Synergies (bruschetta with mozzarella), some diners became suspicious.

“We were laughing because it was like, ‘Do you think we’re being punked?’” said Leigh Wade, an OB-GYN who was there with her husband, Richard Iuorio, an emergency room doctor who’d waited for a reservation since February.

Milk was poured as if it were wine. After all, milk is, as a server explained, "part of the bovine life cycle."

Even if diners were being punked, they were also being fed. And entertained. Performance aspects included people standing outside trying to convince diners and passers-by that Drake was in the house. And there was a fake marriage proposal. 

One diner thought he was witnessing a "social experiment." Perhaps "an NYU production." Another figured out it was some sort of "shtick" being played out, a "punch line of some online joke between a bunch of friends."

Bingo!

The food got mixed reviews. One diner likened it to "wedding buffet." Some sent their plates back to the kitchen. Others found the steak was just fine. (One just shrugged: "I've spent more on less.") One couple, having found out that there really is no Mehran's, is supposedly threatening legal action. (FFS: what harm was done to them? Or maybe Mehran's is just being punked back...)

I got a real kick out of this story.

It was enough that Gen-Z is going to vote and great numbers and save the Republic. Mehran's is frosting on the cake.

One more reason to love Gen-Z.