meet the chef

Chef and restaurateur Shehernaz Orescan’s relationship with food began long before she entered a professional kitchen. Of Mexican and Russian heritage and raised between Asia and Latin America, Shehernaz grew up surrounded by cultures where food was inseparable from family, place, and hospitality. Her earliest teacher was her mother, from whom she learned to cook by instinct, tasting, watching, and measuring with her hands rather than recipes. Food is her love language, and from an early age, cooking became a way of loving and caring for people.

Over the course of a 25-year career in hospitality, Shehernaz worked in more than 15 restaurants across San Francisco, Manhattan, and Raleigh, North Carolina. In New York, she worked with the Lusardi family, whose longstanding presence in Manhattan’s restaurant industry gave her experience within an established multi-restaurant operation. At San Francisco’s Seven Hills, she developed a deeper appreciation for seasonality, local ingredients, and food integrity. Her time working with a Laotian restaurant in North Carolina became equally formative, shaping much of her philosophy around hospitality, leadership, and the importance of caring for the people who make a restaurant possible.

Those years also deepened interests that now run throughout her work: a love of wine, a passion for health, and a belief that the quality and origin of ingredients matter. Yet despite decades spent in professional restaurants, Shehernaz still credits her mother and the generations of women who cooked before her as some of her greatest culinary influences. She believes our grandmothers understood things about food that modern cooking has sometimes forgotten: how to cook intuitively, use what is available, waste little, nourish people, and bring them together around a table.

That philosophy became the foundation for NAZ. Drawing from her heritage, the places she grew up, and a lifetime spent around restaurants, Shehernaz’s cooking moves freely between cultures rather than belonging to any one of them. Asian and Latin American flavors meet the ingredients of the Pacific Northwest, with an emphasis on seasonality, whole ingredients, ancestral techniques, and food that feels as nourishing as it is exciting to eat.

For Shehernaz, there has never been a contradiction between femininity and the professional kitchen. She cooks in dresses, wears pearls in the kitchen, and sometimes has a baby on her back. It is an approach that is distinctly her own, personal, instinctive, and rooted in the belief that some of the most meaningful food is born from memory, culture, travel, and the desire to feed someone well.

At NAZ, that philosophy comes together in a restaurant that is both deeply personal and deliberately difficult to categorize: locally sourced, globally inspired, and built around the idea that food has always been a bridge between cultures.