From Pasta to Purpose: How Armin Milani Cooks Stories, Not Just Food

In episode 59 of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, we sat across from Armin Milani—not just a chef, not just a restaurateur, but a storyteller who swapped the gridlines of graphic design for the sizzling spontaneity of the kitchen. What began as an act of necessity evolved into a lifelong craft of memory, narrative, and flavor.

Armin Milani, the self-taught founder of the concept-driven restaurants Vitrin and Boresh, invites us to reconsider what it means to “cook.” For him, food isn’t simply sustenance—it’s memory, meditation, and meaning. It’s about crafting a space where people reconnect—with each other, with their past, and sometimes with parts of themselves they’ve long forgotten.

A Quiet Leap into the Fire

Armin’s journey didn’t begin with a chef’s coat. It started with pixel grids and vector paths. He studied graphic design, later pivoting to media studies at the School of Architecture in Rome. But when he returned to Tehran, jobless and disillusioned, he began cooking at home. He was watching an Italian cooking show—more noise than nuance—when an idea struck: what if he translated Italian recipes and shared them visually online?

This act of making and documenting food—originally just a creative outlet—soon evolved into something far deeper. When a family friend encouraged him to cook for a restaurant opening nearby, he took a chance. It wasn’t perfection that got him the gig, but his palate, curiosity, and emotional intensity. He didn’t just want to make food—he wanted to evoke something.

That job lasted two years, but it was a lab, a battlefield, a school. The rush of service—the bam bam bam of order tickets, the hiss of the pan, the adrenaline of plating—was intoxicating. “Cooking calms me,” he told us. “It engages every part of me. It’s the only thing that silences the noise in my head.”

Designing With Fire, Not a Mouse

Though Armin walked away from design, he didn’t abandon its principles. He still sketches his dishes. He approaches food the way a designer would—intentional, layered, with a narrative thread. He doesn’t serve food for consumption; he serves it to say something.

This mindset birthed Vitrin in 2016—a restaurant with just one communal table, an open kitchen, and no back-of-house secrets. The kitchen was the stage, the chef a performer, the food a script.

“In Tehran, I saw how disconnected everything was. Kitchens were hidden. Conversations were rare. Everything was private, sterile. I wanted something else—a place where people who didn’t know each other had to sit together. Where they might even talk,” Armin explained.

He didn’t want Vitrin to be known for the prettiest plates. He wanted it to be a place where stories were told with spices, silence was broken with shared bites, and taste became a vehicle for something much deeper.

Memory on a Plate

One of Armin’s most famous dishes is called A Phone Call from Bushehr. The name alone intrigues—and that’s the point. “It doesn’t look like a story,” he laughs, “but it is.” The dish came from a flood of memories, personal grief, and cultural longing. It’s not just made of ingredients. It’s made of moments.

Another is Salad Moness, named after his grandmother. “She was an incredible cook. After she passed, her memory became so present. Making that salad, I remember her hands, her shopping trips, her kitchen smells. The dressing itself became a sentence—a way of saying I miss her.”

This is how Armin works. He doesn’t build dishes to impress. He builds them to remember. To recreate a warmth, a curiosity, a longing.

He once turned Kal Joosh, a childhood comfort dish with roots in Shahroud, into a refined calzone. Iranian flavors, Italian technique, but the soul? Entirely Armin’s.

Social Tables and Silent Protests

At the core of Armin’s vision is a critique of isolation. In a world bent over smartphone screens, he wanted people to look up. So, at Vitrin, diners sit side by side—even strangers. “Some people hated it,” he recalls. “I had a guy break into a sweat and leave. He couldn’t handle sharing space.”

But many more stayed. They started conversations. They became friends. They even started businesses together. Vitrin became more than a restaurant. It became a social experiment.

“When we were kids, our parents called us to the table. It wasn’t just about eating—it was about being together. I wanted to recreate that in a new way.”

This desire isn’t abstract. It’s rooted in a real concern: the rise of loneliness, the decline of physical connection, and the death of dialogue. For Armin, food isn’t just about flavor. It’s about presence.

A Creative Language of Contrast

Armin’s dishes often play with contrast: hot and cold, soft and crunchy, sweet and salty. These contrasts don’t exist just to excite the palate—they exist to wake up the mind. He believes our expectations of food are mental—and when you challenge those expectations, new connections form.

“One of the most beautiful bites is soft-serve ice cream in a crispy cone,” he says. “It’s not just the flavor. It’s the texture meeting your memory, surprising your brain.”

This framework of contrasts—texture, temperature, flavor—is his creative vocabulary. But he never lets aesthetics overtake function. “I’m not cooking for Instagram,” he says bluntly. “I design dishes my team can plate a hundred times and still do it well.”

When the Soul Feeds the Spoon

Armin doesn’t see himself as a businessman. He’s honest about that. “Every time I prioritized money, I messed it up.” But when he let personal concern drive his ideas, innovation followed. During the pandemic, he launched a line of semi-prepared meals—not just to survive, but to reconnect. He vacuum-sealed ingredients with love, creating a version of Vitrin that could travel to people’s homes.

He didn’t just pivot. He adapted his essence. That’s the core of his creativity: not invention for invention’s sake, but expression rooted in feeling.

What drives his work is emotional honesty. “I don’t want people to come, eat, pay, and leave. I’m a jealous chef. I give my 100%. I want that back.”

From Collapse to Comeback

But it hasn’t all been poetic. After Vitrin’s booming years, the pandemic hit. Iran shut down. His space gathered dust. “I was wrecked,” Armin admitted. “There were days I didn’t even turn on the TV. I didn’t cook. I didn’t want to exist.”

It wasn’t until he saw images of empty cities in New York and Paris that he snapped out of it. “I realized this wasn’t just happening to me. It was happening to the world.”

He started filming simple cooking videos. His wife filmed, he cooked. The audience returned. They responded with love, with memories. That saved him again.

Armin’s journey isn’t about food—it’s about people. Whether it’s the stranger across the table, the grandmother in a salad, or the friend behind the camera—it’s all about connection.

The Chef as Catalyst

Today, Armin leads a team of nearly 50. He’s no longer the lone chef experimenting at night—but the heart remains the same. He believes every person in a kitchen earns their space through struggle and intention. He wants his team to feel the work—not just execute it.

“I don’t want a factory. I want a living kitchen. That moment when you ring the bell and send a dish out—that’s everything. That’s why I’m here.”

His second restaurant, Boresh, created with his brother Zhoobin, continues the same mission: bring people together. Blend past and present. Serve something human.

The Final Dish: Creativity as Concern

Perhaps the most powerful insight from Armin’s episode is his view of creativity: “Creativity comes from concern,” he says. “Not from sitting at a laptop drinking coffee, waiting for ideas. You have to care. You have to feel something.”

And Armin feels everything. The loneliness of a solo diner. The loss of his grandmother. The bitterness of being underestimated. The warmth of a Kal Joosh bowl. The anxiety of a nation disconnected from its culinary heritage.

All of it goes into the pan.

And what comes out is not just food—but a conversation. A question. A memory waiting to be awakened.

A Final Bite

There’s a line Armin shared that lingers: “Through cooking, I live more in my past.”

That might be the key to his genius. While the rest of us chase the future, Armin invites us to sit down, share a table, and taste what we’ve forgotten. In a city racing forward, he’s a pause button. In a world craving convenience, he serves care.

Vitrin and Boresh may look like restaurants. But really, they are journals written in salt and smoke, in the quiet bravery of a man who dared to turn loneliness into laughter, memory into movement, and cooking into storytelling.