Rashid Khalaf’s Shahrazad meats Overland Park

The apocryphal Persian king Shahryar had thousands of wives but never kept one longer than 24 hours. The morning after each wedding, according to the legend of the Arabian Nights, Shahryar had his new bride beheaded. By the afternoon, he’d found a new virgin to marry that night.

The bodies stopped piling up when Shahryar married Scheherazade, the daughter of his court vizier. Her ability to spin one exciting story after another kept her husband entranced — and her head firmly on her neck.

Chef and restaurateur Rashid Khalaf has had two wives, and he’s a pretty good storyteller himself. A native of Jerusalem, Khalaf has lived most of his life in the United States. The former soccer-playing college student became a professional cook by taking kitchen jobs in many Middle Eastern restaurants in the area, including the old Athena on Broadway in the 1980s. That’s where he learned how to prepare classic Greek cuisine from the venue’s owners, Yannis and Suzi Vantzos. The Athena, which closed in 1994, was where I met Khalaf. He didn’t teach me anything about cooking, but he did give me a full vocabulary of Arabic curse words, many of which were directed at me. (Apparently, I wasn’t the easiest waiter to work with.)

Last year, Khalaf finally accomplished a dream that he’d spent at least 1,001 nights plotting: a Middle Eastern restaurant, coffee bar and retail store called Shahrazad. “It’s named after the Persian queen,” says Khalaf, who has turned a failed Quizno’s location in south Overland Park into a cheery bistro. Surprisingly provocative Persian music videos play on a TV monitor mounted above a shiny cooler packed with imported beverages, all nonalcoholic. (Khalaf, like many of his customers, is a devout Muslim.)

My friend Carol Ann slugged down half a bottle of pomegranate-flavored Barbican one night over a meal of grilled lamb chops and a tart fatouch salad. The fruit-flavored malt beverage, a product of Dubai-based Aujan Industries, has a slightly beery note but not a drop of the devil’s brew. “I think I’d rather have a cup of hot mint tea,” she told our server halfway through the meal. “This drink doesn’t make you woozy, just gassy.”

I stuck with hot tea from the beginning (though there’s a bottled sour-lemon soda served here that’s delicious with baba ghanoush) and was glad for the mellowing influence it had on my mood. I needed the help — the Shahrazad Café’s interior hasn’t quite escaped its fast-food-joint past. The fluorescent lighting remains so brutal that every patron in the place appears ready to have a mug shot snapped. “Do yourself a favor,” Carol Ann whispered to Khalaf. “Invest in a dimmer. It’s a miracle worker.”

Carol Ann’s theory is that tasteful restaurant lighting is much more important in Johnson County than anywhere else in the metro. “If a woman is going to invest in botox and dermabrasion,” she says, “she won’t like sitting under lights that make her look like Aileen Wuornos.”

For my part, I thought about borrowing a hijab to blot out some of the 1,001 lights. Some of Shahrazad’s lovely, young female servers wear the traditional head scarves, and several of the customers I saw there on my three visits had them on as well. On the night that I dined with my friend Rhiannon, she said she felt conspicuous without one. I suggested that she cross the dining room and go into the retail side of the operation and see if she could buy one. She left for a minute and came back with a jar of pickles and a bag of Turkish coffee. “They were on sale,” she said.

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Khalaf opened the market side of his business last March and then the café seven months later. A couple of months ago, he created a Moorish-style door between the two businesses, which has helped sales enormously, he says: “People like to shop before, during and after dining.”

I’m not that kind of dining patron. I prefer to focus exclusively on eating when I’m sitting at a table — any table. Khalaf makes that easy at Shahrazad because the dishes are presented so attractively. Who would want to look at anything else?

Khalaf is particularly proud of the shiny, segmented steel platters that he found in Chicago and uses for his appetizer combo. The menu lists six items on the platter, including the predictable baba ghanoush, hummus, stuffed grape leaves and falafel. But I’ve ordered this starter three times now, and there have never been the same six items on that tray. Variety is the spice of life, I guess. But for some, the spice of life is still inexplicably cilantro, so I’ve learned to ask nicely for falafel instead of the fragrant cilantro-fried potatoes. (A better bet is to pay a slight upcharge and get them both; the potatoes are worth a couple of bites.) The fried chickpea patties are a shade too crispy, but that lets them stand up to tahini sauce, red chili paste and creamy tsatsiki if you fold all of those ingredients into the soft pita that comes with the combo.

The starter selection is tasty and diverse enough to create a solid, satisfying meal for vegetarians (the list includes vegetable samosas and a great fava-bean dip). That’s good, because the entrée choices tend to be meaty (all of the flesh is halal): gyro and kifta sandwiches, beef or chicken shawarma, marinated lamb chops (divine) and a good array of grilled kebabs (beef, lamb, kifta, chicken or shrimp).

When Khalaf opened his restaurant, he thought he would sell a lot of seafood — this is Johnson County, after all. But he has dropped salmon, scallops and a seafood platter from the menu. “No one was ordering seafood,” he says. “My clientele is either vegetarian or they want beef and lamb.”

I usually want both. The cumin-scented lentil soup is wonderful, and I’ve made a meal out of the fatouch salad (a jumble of chopped crisp cucumbers, radishes, green peppers, tomatoes, red cabbage and bits of deep-fried pita) eaten with a side of soft pita and Shahrazad’s silky hummus.

For customers who want to feel as if they’re dining in the court of King Shahryar, Khalaf has introduced big, round platters that he piles with rice and either the kebab combo or a duo of lamb chops and grilled quail. I’ve always thought that the quail requires a lot of work for very little meat, but Carol Ann found Khalaf’s bird delectable. The petite chops, which Khalaf marinates in salt, pepper, garlic and olive oil, were extraordinary — as good as those he used to prepare at the Athena, and maybe even better. It’s a little anticlimactic to have to eat such outstanding chops with pop or tea, but Khalaf says he hasn’t had any complaints.

“Most people know, even before they step in the door, that I don’t serve alcohol,” he told me one night with a shrug. “They get used to it.”

Traditional Persian desserts are on the menu — baklava, rice pudding, kunafa — but on each of my visits, I ran over to the market side and bought a handful of imported British candy bars. Sometimes, after an exotic meal, nothing sounds better than a Yorkie bar. The wrapper reads: “They’re not for girls.” Neither was Shahryar, but even he might have visited this Shahrazad for a few extra nights.