Revisit our restaurant critic BillAddison's 18-restaurant Persian food tour around Los Angeles.
Most recently the author of “Feast: Food of the Islamic World,” Anissa Helou grew up in Beirut with a Syrian father and Lebanese mother, and wrote her first book about Lebanese food in 1994.
If the cooking at Raffi’s didn’t wow us overall that day, the joyful sense of fellowship among the customers did. “The big groups — the aunts and uncles, the many generations — and it’s absolutely packed on a Tuesday lunch,” Helou said. “We could basically have been in Iran.” Witnessing how these havens nurture community was as important to us as the eating: the boisterous families, the dignified older solo diners, the phonetic melodies of Farsi often chiming through the dining rooms.
With the perfume of meats grilled over charcoal clinging to our clothes, we ranked our five favorite local Iranian restaurants.The Tehran plate special includes chicken, beef and filet mignon kebobs. Rice, a house salad and“The quality of the cooking really jumped notably at the smaller restaurants,” Helou pronounced as we finished our meal at this tiny six-tablehidden among a thicket of other Iranian American cafes and markets in Westwood.
Chef and owner Saghar Fanisalek grew up in Shiraz, an ancient city in south-central Iran. She moved to the U.S. in 2003 and first worked at Shaherzad, one of Westwood’s longest-standing kebab houses; she opened Taste of Tehran in 2013. Her menu dabbles in modernist lavash wraps and renegade concoctions such as spiced lentil-quinoa salad with raisins and dates, but the heart of her cooking lands squarely in Iranian restaurant traditions: kebabs, rice and dips, all done with uncommon finesse.
Chef Saghar Fanisalek grew up in Shiraz, Iran. She worked at Shaherzad in Westwood before opening Taste of Tehran in 2013.kebabs — an Iranian classic of ground meat shaped with distinctive finger-width indentations — were the comparative standard Helou and I ordered from restaurant to restaurant. The exemplar at Taste of Tehran showed a master’s touch, the grated onion in the tender-singed beef added in just the right proportions, every bite vibrantly seasoned.
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