BUTTE — Nestled beneath a historic building in Uptown Butte sits a restaurant bringing a taste of the Mediterranean to the Mining City.
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"When I moved to Butte, I wanted to bring something other than your typical steak, potatoes, hamburgers, and pizza. We have a plethora of that in our city which is fantastic, and we all love that, but I also wanted to bring a piece of my culture," says Azhar Bougary, the owner and chef at Saffron in Butte.
Bougary is a trained pharmacist, but she has been fascinated with cooking ever since she was a child in the kitchen with her grandmother. She draws inspiration for her menu at Saffron from her Arab-American roots.
"I wanted to bring in things like, for example, the curries that I learned to cook when I was a child. The sambusas that I’ve been doing since I was three," says Bougary.
Bougary's official culinary journey began with a cooking class in Saudi Arabia in the early 2000s, but her main training has come from her family.
"My ancestry has a little bit of Moroccan and Turkish on my grandmother’s or here and there, Syrian, Egyptian—and on my father’s side it has Indian up in the ... area kind of between India and Pakistan," says Bougary.
Saffron offers a fine dining experience complete with specialty cocktails in a cozy setting surrounded by the original granite walls of the historic Park Hotel on Park Street in Uptown Butte. Along with Mediterranean dishes, she sprinkles in specials inspired by food she learned to make while traveling in South America and France.
"Myself coming in and opening a restaurant enables us to stand out and say, ‘Hey, we’re here. We have a lot of flavors!' Our flavors range anything from Greek, we do French, we do Moroccan, Algerian—all the way over to India and Pakistan and Malaysia," says Bougary.
Saffron is open from Wednesday through Saturday in the evening starting at 4 in the afternoon, and Bougary offers catering services through her restaurant as well.
