Meet Mirza Chowdhury and His Bangladeshi Cuisine

Mirza Chowdhury visits personally with each diner in this intimate Bangladeshi restaurant located in a nondescript strip mall off Atlanta’s Buford Highway. He calls returning guests by name. He blesses new guests with a generous coupon to return for more.

For many of the visitors to Panahar Bangladeshi Cuisine, this is their first encounter with Bangladeshi cooking—biriyani, halim, and dhaan-shaag—and Mirza serves as an enthusiastic culinary tour guide.

Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1962, Mirza studied the English language as a child by reading grocery bags made from old American newspapers and magazines. As a freshman at Georgia Tech studying engineering, Mirza was lured away by the restaurant business.

After working his way up the food chain of Atlanta’s food and beverage venues, Mirza seized an opportunity to open Atlanta’s first (and, to this day, only) Bangladeshi restaurant in December 2001.

"The whole idea is to make it what I call palatable [food]—to make sure that you do not have to make the food really shockingly or profoundly different to make it nice."

"It could be something simple, as long as it is genuine, as long as it tastes good, as long as it is consistent...

and it is served by people who are genuinely happy that you are there."

"So it’s more like it’s your home. You’re here, people are coming in as a guest and
the fact that we’re all from Bangladesh and they came in and they are curious about
Bangladesh and they want to learn about Bangladesh."

"[Buford Highway] it’s a wonderful location. It works out great for us because people ...automatically know already that Buford Highway has myriads of multi-cultural restaurants from all aspects of this globe – you know all parts of this globe – from everywhere."