The East Village Gets a Legendary Pakistani Chopped Cheese

Zeeshan Bakhrani's life took a weird turn a couple of years ago. As he told Hell Gate last week, Bakhrani left his longtime home in Chicago for New York City in 2022, moved into Downtown Brooklyn ("very much a transplant neighborhood") and was generally just happily chugging along as a self-described "pro IT corporate employee."  

Then, Bakhrani got laid off. Soon enough, the severance and the unemployment ran out. And then... his buddies at the restaurant Nakeem in Williamsburg convinced him to make garam masala hot chicken sandwiches and sell them there as a kind of collab.

"I like creating," Bakhrani said. "I used to make a lot of food content videos just for fun, but doing the sandwich, I realized that I can make things that people want to buy and eat." A booth at Smorgasburg called Nishaan, slinging a new invention, the Pakistani chopped cheese, soon followed, which led to a Nishaan food truck, which led to Bakhrani becoming a TV star as the winner on a reality show called "The Great Food Truck Race."  

In June, Bakhrani upped the ante considerably on his new chopped-cheese life and signed the lease on a tiny space along prime First Avenue in the East Village. Also called Nishaan, it's a counter service restaurant with seating for about ten people crammed inside and some rogue tables set up on the sidewalk out front. Nishaan offers a tight menu of Pakistani-American mashups, and they're all total bangers. It's one of the most exciting new openings of the season, and marks the end of one wild ride for Bakhrani and, presumably, the beginning of another.