The Box

Excellent food, great service and reasonably priced. We had the chicken and lamb kabob dinners. The spinach side melted in your mouth.

The food here is absolutely incredible! My boyfriend and I got the fried eggplant appetizer, and for entrée ordered the chicken kebab, Afghan Kebab, with side dishes: chick peas and spinach.
Everything was freshly made and we loved all of it!

Great place to have authentic halal afghani food. The owners are really sweet! However they work on their own so if you don’t want to wait for like ages (the only drawback) just call them ahead of time and give your order!
The food here is excellent! I especially love their roasted lamb! Omg too good !

mmmmmm good! this place surpassed my expectations by a thousand. this is my new favorite restaurant for vegetarian foods. everything that i ordered for takeout was extremely delicious. i truly recommend this resturant! the wait was a little long, but it was worth it. i didn’t have anything to do anyway.

Service is very slow. If you have 10 people before you then expect an hour of wait. Very slow service literally. I mean it we just got the water after 40 minutes and food is still I don’t know far away. They should hire some one especially for weekend when they expect some moderate rush. Their food is good, but wait literally is really bad. We still have 6 people ahead of us and it mess that we will have to wait 40 minutes at least to get our food. It means that the total wait will be around 2 hours.

Very satisfied on our 1^st trip here. Small, uncrowded but still nice eat-​in dinner. Food was very good for our family of four. Ordered kabobs and subzi chalau for meals and sambosa as appetizer. Will definitely return!

Fresh food at its best. The Kabobs are awesome. A friend had recommended this place. Gave it a try. Boy was I surprised. Really tasty food. I liked the food so
Much I had it catered for my daughter’s birthday party. Wow. Every1 loved it. Give it a try, you won’t be disappointed.

This is by far the best Afghan food in Richmond! It is home made, delicious, and fresh. I personally love the shami kabob! And the falafel and hummus appetizer. Totally recommend them :)

The olde saying you can’t judge a book by its cover fits this restaurant to a T. This is among the very best meals I’ve had all year, actually either second or third and I’ve had dozens of meals in excellent restaurants. I’d never had Afghan food. I ordered the Lamb kabobs w/​rice and the w/​chic peas on the side. My wife ordered the Aushak entrée, a type of meat ravioli. I ordered it as an appetizer as did Kat… she had eggplant and I had a small plate of Aushak. Let me mention there are 38 reviews before mine, 27 five stars, 11 4 stars, nothing less!!! I think that speaks for itself. A husband a wife both serve and prepare the home type cooked meals. If you’re in a rush, don’t be. We ordered Nan and Baklava, also. The restaurant is attached to a service station and you can’t see it from the road… it’s in a shopping strip that has a Food Lion as the anchor and there is a Bryant & Stratton there, also. I, obviously, was impressed, very clean, very neat, very special. I’m now the 28^th 5 star rating. Unique, not hot, just incredibly flavorful. This is one of the reasons I write on Unilocal,to let people know of special, wonderful restaurants that you’d never find, it’s a hidden Jewel.

Chicken kebabs are delicious and tender. Really great flavor. The owners are friendly and helpful. Definitely worth checking out. Bizarrely, it shares a building with a gas station.

driving from Jersey starving looking for a place on my trip to North Carolina and I am so happy I found this place!!! absolutely unreal! the Mantu was to die for and the food itself was authentic! the shami kebab beef was so tender and delicious! my only advice is order ahead whether you are taking out or dining in because this is a business ran by a lovely old couple who also cook the food! DEFINITELY worth coming here, probably the best afgan food I have had.

The only reason this doesn’t get 5 stars is because the service is quite slow. But it’s because they make their food fresh, and it’s delicious, and after you’re done eating, you don’t care that it took an hour to come !

Very tasty food! We tried a lot of different things and they were all great. Make sure you have plenty of time as it does take awhile to get your food. Appetizers are quick to come out, however, which is nice.

Really really good food! Recommend to all. Food was awesome and owner was very nice. Don’t let the gas station ambiance fool you. Check it out!

Great food. Great kabobs all home style cooked. Every time I am in town, I come here and nothing beats this food. Call ahead and have the food be ready so you don’t have wait too long. Enjoy.

Really flavorful and amazing. The Bouranee Banjee eggplant dish is delicious and made this my favorite spot in Richmond. I’ve been back with my mother several times… and she’s a Middle Eastern mother that’s hard to please!
As others have mentioned, food is slow as it is all cooked from scratch. One solution is to call and order ahead.

So was visiting my uncle and he took us to this little gem as we’ve never had Afghan cuisine before… Wow the quality of the food was amazing and the price was unbeatable. To top it off the place is run by a very nice couple. Off the beaten path but well worth it. Try the combo kebab platter.

Food was great, service was slow, atmosphere was creepy.
The food was wonderful! Had the lamb gyro for lunch which was very flavorful. We went on a lunch break, which was a terrible idea. The server was so sweet, but the restaurant had no lights on, no music, and no one else inside. I was dying to get out of there and was tempted many times to just ask for the food to go since it took about 45 min for two lunch items.
Sweet couple who obviously take a lot of pride in their food {and they should}. I will continue to support their business, however I’m ordering to go from now on! :)

Loved the quaint little mom-​n-​pop restaurant. I ordered the Kabob Combo with rice, salad and home made bread. I also had the Eggplant appetizer-​Yummy!
Everything was seasoned perfectly and even had a little curry kick. If you don’t like curry just ask them to go light on the seasoning.
Lots of food and so fresh!
Since everything is homemade and I knew that took a little longer, I called ahead and ordered my food. So as soon as I got there my food was served. It was ready in about 30 minutes
Most items on the menu were under $ 10. Can’t wait to come back with friends for a special meal.

Man, oh man. Best Afghan food I’ve ever had, and the place looks like a convenience store from the outside. Don’t judge a book and all that. Here’s the low-​down.
The place is attached to a gas station. Don’t worry about that. Just go in. Location ain’t everything, and this place backs that up.
The interior immediately makes you forget you’re next to a gas station. But for a window looking out at the people driving to and from the pumps, you’d never know. The décor is timeless without looking old-​fashioned, clean, bright, though a bit stuffy on a hot August evening, despite the best efforts of two air conditioners mounted high on the walls.
It’s all about the food, and it is sensational. Our food was made when we ordered it, all of it as fresh as could be. Yeah, it took a while to get our food, even though we were the only people there (more on that in a minute). But it was worth the wait, and then some.
My wife and I started with an appetizer with a name I can neither remember nor pronounce. It was a pastry filled with ground beef, garlic, and scallions and it came out piping hot. It was paired with a cool, refreshing green sauce whose name also is past my abilities to recall. It was a simple thing, but the beef had been perfectly and boldly seasoned, and the sauce complemented it perfectly.
We each had a kabob, chicken for her, lamb for me. Each came with a salad, seasoned rice, bread, and a side of either chick peas or spinach. We each chose the latter. Her chicken was intensely flavorful, though not heavy-​handed. My lamb was seared and seasoned with a surprising and potent combination of spices and herbs. And boy was it tender, like a love scene in a movie. We each finished our meals wanting another morsel or two. The rice (basmati) was downright strident in its flavors, really defying expectations for dull, ordinary rice. The salad was simple, but cool and crisp, a perfect coupling with the opposite end of the taste spectrum that much of the rest of the meal occupied. The bread was light and airy, and the spinach was fine, though perhaps slightly too seasoned if you like the taste of spinach unadorned (as my wife does).
For dessert we tried the Gilibi, an Afghani funnel cake tossed in some kind of honey-​like syrup. It was tasty, crunchy, and a bit drippy from the syrup. Still nice.
The quality of all the ingredients was top-​notch. Whoever was manning the kitchen earned his or her keep. The biggest problem I have with The Box is that at 7:00 pm on a Saturday night, we were the only people there. They need more people in there so they can stay open and keep serving the area’s best Afghan food.