Perched on the third floor of a large plaza on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood, Perse is aiming to be a new kind of Persian restaurant for Los Angeles. Farinaz "Naz" Pirshirazi and her brother Farbod opened the spot in February with a clear mission: to push back on how the city thinks about food from Iran.
Los Angeles is home to the largest Iranian community outside Iran, and for decades the Westwood neighborhood known as Tehrangeles has set the template for Persian dining in the city: kabob, a handful of well known stews and rice. Pirshirazi, who came to Los Angeles in 2011, said she was taken aback by how narrow the offerings felt.
"It felt like they took 18 foods of that wonderful 3,000-plus types of dishes that we have in Iran.. and kind of copy-pasted," she said. Walking into certain restaurants, she added, was like stepping into the pre-revolution Iran she knew only from old films. "For me it was time travel," she said.
She is not alone in that view. Naz Deravian, author of the cookbook Bottom of the Pot and a New York Times Cooking contributor who has lived in Los Angeles since 1996, said the city's Iranian food scene "was getting a little stagnant" over the past two decades, though she was quick to note that the classic kabob houses still have their place in the food culture.
Why the cuisine stalled here, compared with the evolution of Korean or Mexican food, is hard to pin down. Pirshirazi suspects immigrant parents discouraged their children from entering the restaurant business. Deravian points to geopolitics: "We can't leisurely travel to Iran and experience the food there," she said. "It's not like just going to Italy for the summer." A few outliers have emerged, including Azizam, which began as a pop-up and opened in Silver Lake in 2024, and Atlanta-based Rumi's Kitchen, which arrived in Century City in September, but restaurants that break the kabob house mold remain rare.
Perse's menu reflects Pirshirazi's upbringing. During the Iran-Iraq War, her parents fled the bombing in Tehran and settled in Sari, in Mazandaran province along the Caspian Sea, where neighbors taught her mother the herb-rich northern Iranian cooking built on seafood, duck, pomegranate molasses and sour orange. The family moved back to Tehran in 1989, and Pirshirazi was born the following year, but the northern dishes stayed on the table. As a child she noticed classmates had never heard of most of what she ate, and she remembers road trips across Iran when her father would stop at local grocers to ask about regional specialties.
That range is on display in dishes like the fesenjoon, a slow-simmered walnut and pomegranate stew from Gilan province on the Caspian Sea. Silky and earthy from ground walnuts, it balances sweet and tart in a way that recalls a tangy mole, and it comes topped with duck confit that lends a rich, gamey note. From Tehran there is the Bazari koobideh, modeled on the version served at the city's Grand Bazaar, where Pirshirazi says older men eat it four or five times a week, cracking an egg yolk over the rice and mixing it with butter, sumac and lemon juice until it becomes, in her words, like a carbonara.
At Perse, a skewer of ground beef and lamb arrives over flatbread with saffron rice, a grilled tomato, sumac and a ramekin of egg yolk sauce standing in for the raw yolk. "You can literally close your eyes, and it feels like you are eating koobideh in the Grand Bazaar of Tehran," she said.
Looking ahead, Pirshirazi is weighing a monthly four-course dinner starting next year, limited to 20 to 24 guests, each one built around a single city or region such as Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan or the north and south of Iran. Deravian would welcome that kind of focus, comparing Persian cooking to Italian food, which grew beyond red-sauce restaurants into regional cuisine. "Iranian cuisine is hyper regional, and we haven't gotten to that place yet," she said. Her hope is that Persian food becomes an everyday option: "It just needs to become .. a popular cuisine to think of on a Wednesday night."
