• NYC Restaurant News

Little Flower Cafe and baker Bryan Ford are opening Diljān in Brooklyn Heights soon

Nov 4, 2025, 7:54 PM UTC

Nadia Chaudhury/Eater NY

• NYC Restaurant News

A New Destination for Afghan Baked Goods Is Coming to Brooklyn

Little Flower Cafe and baker Bryan Ford are opening Diljān in Brooklyn Heights soon

Nov 4, 2025, 7:54 PM UTC

Nadia Chaudhury/Eater NY

Nadia Chaudhury is a born-and-raised New Yorker who is an editor for Eater’s Northeast region and Eater New York, was the former Eater Austin editor for 10 years, and often writes about food and pop culture.

New York City is already a really good bakery town. But it’s about to get even better this fall with a new Brooklyn spot focusing on Afghan baked goods from the team behind a stellar Astoria halal coffee shop and an expert baker. Ali Zaman and Mohamed Ghiasi, co-partners of Little Flower Cafe, and baker Bryan Ford are opening Diljān in Brooklyn Heights at 330 Hicks Street, at Atlantic Avenue, with plans to debut in November.

Diljān’s centerpiece will be its Afghan flatbread, aka Afghan naan — “the star of the show,” Ford tells Eater, explaining that the team plans on hanging the bread from the window of the tiny bakery for all to see. The carbs will come in a large or small size, meant to be ripped and dipped into condiments like honey, pomegranate, molasses, eggplant, and different chutneys.

“The core of my work has always been: How do we decolonize baking?” Ford says. While he’s rooted in the Latin American baking world, what excited him about Diljān was that he was able to deep-dive into a whole different baking culture. “I get to learn again and ask questions and smell things and taste things and play with things,” he says, like dates and black lava salt. “How do we find harmony while giving people in New York what they want?”

Ford has been researching and developing the pastries with Zaman’s input. These will make use of frequently used Afghan ingredients saffron, cardamom, pistachio, apricots, both dried and candied, and more “cool little flavors,” Ford says.

“We want to have fun,” Ford continues. “We want to channel a new energy around what bread is supposed to look like, where bread is supposed to come from. Baking in the Middle East is, in my opinion, one of the most vibrant areas to explore breads and grains.”

Diljān’s will have a take on samosas with ground halal lamb and beef (sourced from neighboring Sami’s Kebab House, which is run by Zaman’s father, Sami Zaman) in a dough swirl, dusted with powdered sugar; the Saffron Shah, a cross-laminated, crescent-shaped pastry filled with a saffron pastry cream; and the sheer pira (an Afghan milk fudge) topped with a diplomat cream made with firni (an Afghan custard). Everything will be baked with stone-ground flour. Other works-in-progress play with chocolate-and-cherry pairings; walnut sticky buns made with gur (essentially like an Afghan jagger); and halawa.

Ford is a notable baker, known for his Latin American baked goods — his parents are Honduran; he grew up in New Orleans — through pop-ups and collaborations. He’s also a cookbook author, having written Pan y Dulce: The Latin American Baking Book and New World Sourdough. (Ford had been talking about opening his own panadería, which he says is still in the works.) You also might’ve seen his awe-inspiring video of him creating patty-topped coco focaccia.

Ford and Zaman became friends when Little Flower Cafe opened in 2021. Ford even helped Zaman sharpen the cafe’s pastry program, and they wanted to work on something together. Zaman and Ghiasi signed the lease of the Brooklyn address earlier this spring, originally aiming for a cafe, but they changed it to a bakery and tagged Ford to partner with them.

Zaman and Ghiasi followed Little Flower with a gas station halal burger spot, Blue Hour, in Bushwick in 2024, but it closed earlier this year. The two have since formed Bigger Picture Hospitality as an umbrella group for Little Flower, Diljān, and future projects.

They’re also working on a halal butcher shop in Astoria at 29th Street, aiming to open in the spring of 2026. Zaman teases halal meats like house-made sausages, prosciuttos, cured options, dry-aged cuts, charcuteries, and more. “We’re going to have a cheesemonger — something that doesn’t exist in the halal space,” Zaman tells Eater.

And that’s not all: There are also plans for a sourdough cookie bakery with Ford, and, eventually, a homestyle Afghan restaurant.