Brentwood’s Perse takes Persian food beyond the kabob house

Take the escalator to the third floor of a sprawling plaza on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood and you’ll find Perse, a different kind of Persian restaurant.

Farinaz “Naz” Pirshirazi and her brother, Farbod, opened Perse in February to challenge how Angelenos think about Persian food.

Los Angeles is home to the largest Iranian community outside Iran, and for decades, nearby Westwood’s “Tehrangeles” has defined what Persian dining looks like here: kabob, a few familiar stews and rice.

Frozen in time

When Pirshirazi arrived in Los Angeles in 2011, she was surprised by what she saw when it came to food from her home country.

“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 some restaurants felt like stepping into the pre-revolution Iran she’d seen in old movies.

“For me it was time travel,” she said.

She isn’t the only one who sees it. Naz Deravian — author of the cookbook Bottom of the Pot and a New York Times Cooking contributor who has lived in L.A. since 1996 — said the city’s Iranian food scene “was getting a little stagnant” over the past two decades.

Buffet shelves in Perse’s main dining room hold old books and black-and-white photographs, a nod to the decor found in traditional Iranian homes.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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“I hate to say this because I love L.A. so much,” she said.

Deravian quickly added that the classic kabob houses still matter: “Those restaurants have their place in the food culture.”

Why it stalled

It's hard to pin down why Persian food here hasn’t evolved the way Korean or Mexican food has. Pirshirazi thinks immigrant parents steered their kids away from 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.”

Still, there are exceptions. Azizam, which started as a pop-up, opened in Silver Lake in 2024, and Atlanta-based Rumi’s Kitchen opened in Century City in September. But restaurants that break from the kabob-house format remain few and far between.

Mazandaran and her mom

Pirshirazi’s upbringing shaped Perse's menu. During the Iran-Iraq War, her parents left Tehran to escape the bombing and settled in Sari, in Mazandaran province along the Caspian Sea. There, neighbors taught her mother to cook northern Iranian food, rich in herbs, seafood, and duck, with pomegranate molasses and sour orange for acidity.

The family returned to Tehran in 1989, and Pirshirazi was born the next year. But northern cooking stayed on the table, and as a kid she realized her classmates had never heard of most of the food she ate every day. She also remembered childhood road trips across Iran, when her father often stopped at local grocers and asked about regional favorites.

Regional differences

That regional range shows up across Perse's menu. Start with the fesenjoon, a slow-simmered walnut-and-pomegranate stew from Gilan, on the Caspian Sea. The stew is silky with an earthy texture from the ground walnuts, and it balances sweet and tart almost like a tangy mole. On top sits duck confit, which adds a rich, gamey note to every bite.

From Tehran comes the Bazari koobideh, which Pirshirazi modeled on the version served at the city’s Grand Bazaar, where she says older men eat it four or five times a week.

The Bazari koobideh, modeled on the kabobs served at Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, comes with a saffron egg yolk sauce that, stirred into the rice, turns it almost carbonara-like.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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“Whenever they have their koobideh, they crack an egg yolk on top of the rice, mixing everything together with some butter, some sumac, some lemon juice, and then it becomes like a carbonara pasta,” Pirshirazi said.

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. The sauce is her answer to 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.

Next steps

Starting next year, Pirshirazi is considering a monthly four-course dinner, limited to 20 to 24 guests, built around a single city or region, such as Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, or northern or southern Iran.

“I think that would be a wonderful, wonderful idea to showcase each region,” she said.

That’s the kind of focus Deravian hopes to see more of, comparing Persian cooking to Italian food, which evolved beyond red-sauce joints into more regional cooking.

“Iranian cuisine is hyper regional, and we haven’t gotten to that place yet,” she said.

Ultimately, she wants Persian food to be an everyday choice rather than something saved for special occasions.

“It just needs to become … a popular cuisine to think of on a Wednesday night,” she said. “‘Oh, let’s go out for Persian food.’”