3 days, 18 Persian restaurants
THURSDAY, AUGUST 8, 2019
D
A
nissa Helou speared a charred, oval slice of grilled donbalan
— Farsi for lamb testicle — with her fork and considered her
bite. The appearance and texture of the kebab resembled a
supple sea scallop, though the flavor had a restrained gam-
iness, tempered by its smoky edges. “It’s cooked correctly,”
Helou said. Then she added: “It’s amazing to be eating this dish in L.A.”
We were having the third of our day’s seven meals — eight if you
count a final stop for ice cream — at Attari Grill, an Iranian restaurant
in Westwood. The restaurant is the lesser-known adjunct to popular
sibling Attari Sandwich Shop; they face each other across a
courtyard where customers linger at tables shaded by colorful
umbrellas, and they serve similarly meaty menus and grab-
and-go foods. But only the Grill prepares donbalan.
Helou is a Lebanese Syrian cookbook author, based
in Sicily, who has spent the last two decades tirelessly
traveling to research the culinary Middle East and its
diaspora. In May, she won a James Beard Award for her
530-page magnum opus, “Feast: Food of the Islamic World.”
The dish at Attari amazed her because the offal, while quite
common in the Middle East, is too rarely served in America in
restaurants of any kind. It was a standout surprise during our recent
self-assigned mission: to eat meals at as many of the Iranian restau-
rants in the Los Angeles metropolitan area as we could manage in our
2½ days together.
All told, we made it to 18 places.
We both wanted to better grasp the city’s Iranian American culture
by scaling mountain after saffron-peaked mountain of rice, wadingthrough every possible herbaceous stew and devouring as many differ-
ent kinds of kebabs as we could find. We collated the most compelling
recommendations from colleagues and friends and scarfed down hearty
breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Clear champions emerged.
There were dozens, if not hundreds, of options to narrow down.
Southern California has the largest Iranian population outside Iran.
Community estimates tally 300,000 to 500,000 Iranian American resi-
dents in the region; the Census Bureau says Los Angeles is home to
87,000 people of Iranian heritage.
Tehrangeles, as the Westwood-based community has long
been nicknamed, began to take shape in the 1960s; it mush-
roomed with the newcomers who fled Iran in response to
the country’s scarring 1979 revolution. The two Attari
restaurants reside on a block that received an official
designation as “Persian Square” by Los Angeles in 2010,
an acknowledgment of how deep the local Iranian American
roots have reached.
We never saw donbalanoffered again. Most of the menus at
the other restaurants we visited — in Westwood, Glendale, Irvine
and Anaheim — shared a specific sameness. Kebabs, served with
drifts of rice, predominate: lamb, beef, chicken, usually a couple of
seafood choices. Several stews appear again and again: moss-toned
ghormeh sabzi(kidney beans and often lamb or beef simmered with
dried lime and half a dozen herbs), sweet-and-sour fesenjan(chicken in
a sauce thick with walnuts and racing with pomegranate molasses) and
gheymeh(a tumble of spiced tomato, beef and split yellow peas, with
fried eggplant or a crown of fried potatoes makingThe old-school Westwood Persian restaurant Shamshiri Grill is a fine place to splurge on pricier cuts of meat, such as the mesquite-grilled rack of lamb kebab.
Christina HouseLos Angeles TimesBy Bill Addison[SeePersian,F4]Illustrations by
Parisa Parnian
For The TimesF