Two-thirds down the 14 entrees listed on the menu at Perse, a 7-month-old upscale Persian restaurant in Brentwood, there’s an option identified simply as “Market Fish.”
It’s couched among dishes that sound more enthralling, like saffron lamb chops or fesenjoon with duck confit, so it’s easy for the eyes to slide right past those two vague words. An extra bit of description, “Northern style walnut barberry sauce,” doesn’t much jump off the page, either.
Take the leap to order the fish. It turns out to be the most exciting plate of food on the table, and an illustration of how the restaurant’s special, nonconformist hallmarks can be too easily missed.
Its big, herbal, tart-sweet flavors speak as much to regional origins as it does to some original thinking from Farinaz “Naz” Pirshirazi, the restaurant’s co-owner and chief innovator. She’s attempting a daring equation at Perse: She wants to embolden customers to taste what’s beyond the codified repertoire of kebabs, dips, stews and pilafs served by most Persian restaurants in Los Angeles. Potential converts must first find their way to her shiny space atop an ’80s-era battleship of a shopping complex on San Vicente Boulevard.
Climb the maze of escalators, order a cocktail fragrant with orange blossom and cardamom tea (or try a sour cherry juice) and request Pirshirazi to guide you to the less-common dishes she’s excited about. Her fervor and her talent for storytelling are persuasive.
Take mahi shekam por, the inspiration behind Market Fish. Translated literally as “full-bellied fish,” stuffed with an herbed filling of nuts and dried berries, it’s a classic centerpiece during Nowruz celebrations, with different variations across every corner of the country.
The Perse version channels the country’s northern provinces along the Caspian Sea, which traditionally highlight a species of carp that swims in local waters. Japanese sea bream and New Zealand red snapper remind Pirshirazi most closely of its mild flavor.
She opts to serve the stuffing separately, underneath the turmeric-stained fillet, with the concentrated twang of pomegranate molasses rippling through a mulch of finely crushed walnuts, tiny barberries, garlic and a mix of mint, basil, cilantro and parsley. Beurre blanc pools in the base of its bowl — an unorthodox addition, perhaps an insurance policy for overall lusciousness, but its presence doesn’t interfere flavor-wise.
Pirshirazi was born in Tehran, but she’ll share that northern Iranian specialties were a staple of her childhood. Her mother learned to cook from women in Sari, a small city near the coast, when her parents lived there through most of the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, when bombing in Tehran was frequent. Early exposure to regional specificities encouraged Pirshirazi to travel her home country broadly before moving to the United States in 2011.
While earning public health degrees in Irvine and Berkeley, she founded restaurants with her brother, Farbod, beginning with casual, now-closed Chicken Chick in Gardena in 2016. Three years later they opened Toranj in Westwood, debuting a second location in Manhattan Beach last December.
Toranj follows the tried-and-true formula: undulating kebabs; yogurt salads seasoned with cucumber, dried wild shallots or spinach; glassy tahdig that could break teeth, made pliable by the heat of stews (always the same three on local Persian menus: sour-sweet fesenjoon, herbaceous ghormeh sabzi and yellow split pea-based gheimeh) spooned over top.
Los Angeles is home to the largest Iranian population outside Iran. The biggest diaspora wave arrived as families fled the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Pirshirazi mentioned in a phone interview that at Toranj, when she has attempted to introduce a dish that varied from the established local restaurant repertoire, she’d get angry responses from older Iranian Americans, insisting the cooking wasn’t “authentically Persian.”
“I understand people are attached to certain foods as comforting, and those notions of comfort never really changed,” Pirshirazi said. “In other Persian diaspora communities, like Toronto, immigrants opened beautiful, unique restaurants serving regional or creative takes on the cuisine. This business is hard, and I think here people discouraged their children from going into the industry. They wanted them to become doctors and lawyers or, worst-case scenario, to go into real estate.”
Yet she felt the calling. Perse joins a handful of other L.A. outliers — wonderful Azizam in Silver Lake and Kouzeh Bakery in Mid-Wilshire, among them — that dare veer into the wider possibilities of the Iranian kitchen. (For home cooking, “Food of Life” by Najmieh Batmanglij is a definitive tome chronicling the cuisine’s scope).
Khoresht is a vast category of generously spiced meat stews that vary to incorporate each season’s fruits and vegetables. Perse serves a late-summer deconstruction of tender short rib covered in eggplant spears and tomato sauce punctuated with spheres resembling green olives, but they’re sour grapes delivering piercing, complementary punch. The menu will soon shift to include khoresh kadoo, a warming marriage of winter squashes, saffron and dried fruits.
Another gift from the north: kebab torsh, filet mignon marinated in the familiar combination of pomegranate and walnut, though the beefiness tempers their flavors more acutely, with a notably savory effect, than the pairing of poultry usually found in restaurants. Another kebab riffs on dombeh, or lamb tail fat, sometimes layered with skewered meats to render during grilling. Pirshirazi uses intensely marbled A5 Wagyu with filet mignon to achieve similar, less gamey unctuousness.
In Tehran, there’s an old custom of adding a raw egg yolk and butter to the rice served alongside kebabs. They’re stirred quickly to create a creamy emulsion, as one might attain with pasta carbonara. Pirshirazi mimics the technique with a saffron-yolk sauce she serves alongside a nicely charred koobideh made with ground beef and lamb.
These jewels are all for the finding if you’re inclined to seek them out. One night, I brought a non-Iranian friend who enjoys Persian food. At the end of the meal, he said, “If you hadn’t known to order all these interesting things, I would have just asked for my usuals.”
I saw what he meant. Perse, in an expensive and competitive part of town, can’t completely depart from the crowd-pleasers. You could land on its third-floor patio, or in its sedate inner dining room, scan the selections, choose cucumber yogurt, shirazi salad, hummus (an Eastern Mediterranean creation adopted in most local Persian restaurants) and a nice saffron chicken kebab … and not give much thought to regional rarities. Service is attentive and well-informed, but Pirshirazi is the educator. If she’s not around, no one is pointing out the restaurant’s differentiators, and the written menu, per the Market Fish, doesn’t really convey those aspects, either.
Same goes at brunch, where eggs benedict with saffron hollandaise, lovely Turkish eggs poached in yogurt and the ubiquitous shakshuka can obscure the real star: date omelet, born from the abundance of fruit that grows in southern Iran. Scented fleetingly with cinnamon, the dates gently smoked, their rightness with eggs sounds improbable. But the sum succeeds, teetering deliciously between sweet and savory.
Throw in a billowy, saffron-scented Dutch baby pancake and lacy-crisp kookoo sibzamini (herbed, eggy potato patties) and I’d say, given the restaurant’s stillness during my Sunday meal, this is the most under-sung brunch in Los Angeles.
Will people discover Perse’s inobvious treasures? I hope so. Pirshirazi has ambition and heart. She could shift the city’s perspectives enough to expand local definitions of Persian dining. She needs to highlight the route for us a little more clearly, and we need to be curious enough to follow her into broader horizons.
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