Drive down Culver Drive on a Saturday morning and the first clue is the bread. Somewhere behind a supermarket counter, a baker is slapping dough against the wall of a stone oven flown in from Iran, and the smell of warm sangak drifts out across the car park. The Persians in Irvine did not build a Little Tehran here. They did something quieter and, in its way, more ambitious. They folded themselves into one of America’s most carefully planned cities and made it partly their own.
The Place
Irvine is not an old place. It barely existed before the 1960s, when the Irvine Company began turning a vast cattle ranch into a master-planned city arranged as a collection of villages, each clustered around its own schools. The University of California, Irvine opened at its centre, and the whole thing grew outward from there in tidy, deliberate rings.
Today around 300,000 people live in Irvine, and the city has a reputation that almost reads like a marketing brochure. The FBI has repeatedly named it the safest large city in America. The Irvine Unified School District ranks among the best in California, with a long roll of Blue Ribbon and Distinguished School awards.
For a community that arrived with degrees, savings and a fierce belief in education, this was close to an ideal landing place. Irvine offered exactly the three things that mattered most: safe streets, excellent schools and a research university on the doorstep.
There is a certain irony in it. A culture thousands of years old, with its poetry, its gardens and its ancient festivals, putting down roots in a city that did not exist a lifetime ago and whose villages were laid out on a planner’s drawing board. Yet the fit turned out to be natural. Irvine valued order, achievement and family, and so did the families arriving from Tehran.
How It Became Persian
The first arrivals
Iranians began coming to California well before the upheavals of 1979. A first wave arrived through the 1960s and early 1970s, many of them students sent abroad to study engineering, medicine and the sciences, often on government scholarships during the oil-rich years of the Pahlavi monarchy.
Southern California, with its universities and its sunshine, drew a steady share of them. Some returned home. Many quietly decided to stay.
The revolution and the exodus
Everything changed in 1979. The Iranian Revolution and the founding of the Islamic Republic sent hundreds of thousands of Iranians out of the country, and the United States became the single largest destination. More than 1.2 million people of Iranian origin now live in America, and roughly half of them are in California.
This wave was different from ordinary economic migration. It carried the professional and propertied classes of Tehran: doctors, engineers, academics, business owners and their families. People who had everything to lose under the new order, and who left with their qualifications even when they could not leave with their wealth.
Why Orange County, and why Irvine
Los Angeles drew the largest share, building the dense cluster around Westwood that became known as Tehrangeles, and the showier money of Beverly Hills. But a quieter, more suburban current flowed south into Orange County. By 1990, Irvine and the Palos Verdes Peninsula already held some of the largest concentrations of Iranian Muslims in the region.
The pull was logical. Many Iranian families wanted the same things the master plan was selling: low crime, top schools, a brand new university and clean suburban streets where a child could be raised without fear. Where one family settled, relatives and old Tehran friends followed, the slow chain migration that quietly turns a few households into a community.
The Landmarks
Wholesome Choice, 18040 Culver Drive. The unofficial cultural anchor of Persian Irvine. Founded by Iranian food importer “Mike” Mokhtare, originally from Tabriz, it is a sprawling international market with a famous hearthstone oven imported from Iran that turns out fresh sangak all day. Its prepared-food counters run from Persian stews and kabobs to Greek, Japanese and a French-Persian bakery, and on weekends it functions as a meeting place as much as a shop.
Super Irvine, formerly 14120 Culver Drive. The city’s original Persian and Middle Eastern supermarket, family-run from 1996. When it lost its Culver Drive lease around 2022 it became a small local heartbreak, but the family kept the name alive, regrouped, and the market has since reopened in a larger, modern space. Few businesses carry the memory of immigrant Irvine quite so directly.
Caspian Restaurant, 14100 Culver Drive. A grand banquet-style Persian restaurant with a sweeping interior and live Persian music, long treated as a social centre for the local community. Saffron rice, charcoal-grilled kabobs and family-sized platters arrive at tables where three generations gather and the language at dinner is as often Farsi as English.
Shater Abbas, Irvine. A beloved kabob house in the international Persian-restaurant tradition, known for affordable platters and bread stretched and grilled in front of diners. It is the kind of unpretentious, everyday place where the food, not the decor, is the point, and where homesick palates are reliably satisfied.
The Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, UC Irvine. Established as a campus centre in 2009 through an endowment from microtechnology pioneer Dr Fariborz Maseeh, it was the first interdisciplinary Persian-studies centre in the entire University of California system. UCI now holds the highest concentration of endowed chairs in ancient Iranian studies of any North American university, a remarkable thing to sit a short drive from Wholesome Choice.
NIPOC, 5 Oldfield, Irvine. The Network of Iranian American Professionals of Orange County, founded in the mid-1980s as a non-political, non-profit organisation, with hundreds of members. It runs networking events, professional development and cultural programming, and crucially it organises the area’s signature Persian festival each autumn.
Mehregan, the Persian festival of autumn. Organised in the Irvine area, Mehregan revives an ancient harvest celebration that predates Nowruz, honouring Mehr, the spirit of friendship and light. Held in community parks and venues around Irvine, it fills an afternoon with traditional music, dance, poetry and food, and is a public declaration that this culture is here to stay.
Where They Came From
The Persians of Irvine came overwhelmingly from Iran, and within Iran most especially from Tehran. The capital’s professional middle and upper class, the doctors, dentists, engineers, architects and business owners, formed the backbone of the post-1979 exodus, and Orange County drew a large share of exactly that demographic.
It is worth being precise about identity here. Many in Irvine prefer “Persian” to “Iranian,” partly to distance their heritage from the politics of the Islamic Republic, partly because Persian speaks to a civilisation thousands of years old rather than a modern state. The two words describe the same people in different registers, one cultural and ancient, one national and contemporary.
The community is also strikingly diverse in faith. It includes secular and observant Muslims, a significant Iranian Jewish population, Baha’is, Christians and Zoroastrians, groups that in Southern California have largely coexisted as one Persian diaspora bound by language, food and a shared sense of exile rather than by religion.
That breadth is part of why Orange County’s community settled the way it did. Rather than concentrating in a single ethnic enclave the way some immigrant groups have, Iranians in Orange County tended to spread into diverse suburban neighbourhoods, more dispersed and more integrated than the dense cluster around Westwood to the north.
What held them together was never a postcode. It was the language, spoken at home and at the dinner table; the food, from herb-flecked rice to the sour tang of dried lime in a stew; the poetry of Hafez and Ferdowsi carried in memory; and a shared experience of exile, of having left a homeland that many could not safely return to. Those things travel without an enclave.
Irvine Today
Persian Irvine in the 2020s is confident and established. It is a community measured less by a single street than by an accumulation of details: the Farsi heard in school pick-up lines, the saffron and dried limes stacked high at Wholesome Choice, the Persian names on the doors of medical and dental practices across the city.
UC Irvine sits at the heart of it, both as the university many of the community’s children attend and as a serious centre of Persian scholarship. The pairing of a working immigrant grocery and a world-class Persian studies centre within a few miles of each other captures something true about this place.
The community’s character also distinguishes it from its larger northern cousin. If Tehrangeles is loud, commercial and concentrated, Orange County’s Persians are more suburban, more dispersed and arguably more quietly affluent, a professional community that succeeded by integration rather than enclave. It is closer in temperament to the Iranian families who settled places like Irvine’s Taiwanese community than to the Persian Square of Westwood.
Irvine has long been a city of newcomers who came for the schools and stayed for the life, much like the families who built nearby Little Saigon in Westminster. The Persians simply did it in their own register, with sangak and saffron, with Mehregan in the autumn, and with a centre at the university that ensures the language and the literature will outlast the first generation of exiles. For more on the wider diaspora, the history of Iranian Americans and UCI’s own Jordan Center for Persian Studies trace the same arc.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Iranians live in Irvine and Orange County?
Estimates vary widely depending on the source and how Iranian identity is counted, with American Community Survey figures placing roughly 32,000 Iranian Americans in Orange County while some community researchers estimate the broader Persian population much higher. Orange County is generally regarded as home to the second largest Iranian community in the nation after Los Angeles.
What is the difference between “Persian” and “Iranian”?
They refer to the same people. “Iranian” is the modern national term, while “Persian” points to the language and the ancient civilisation. Many in Irvine prefer “Persian,” partly to separate their cultural heritage from the politics of the current Iranian government.
Why did so many Iranians settle in Irvine specifically?
Irvine offered exactly what the post-1979 professional exodus was looking for: very low crime, top-ranked public schools, a major research university in UC Irvine, and clean master-planned suburbs. Once early families settled, relatives and friends followed through chain migration.
Where can I find Persian food and groceries in Irvine?
Wholesome Choice on Culver Drive is the best-known destination, famous for its imported stone oven baking fresh sangak. Super Irvine, the city’s original Persian market dating to 1996, also reopened after losing its old lease. Caspian and Shater Abbas are among the established Persian restaurants.
How does Orange County’s Iranian community differ from Tehrangeles?
Tehrangeles, around Westwood in Los Angeles, is a dense, commercial and highly visible enclave. Orange County’s Iranians tend to be more dispersed across diverse suburban neighbourhoods, more integrated, and quietly professional, doctors, dentists, engineers and business owners spread through Irvine and nearby cities.
What is Mehregan?
Mehregan is an ancient Persian autumn festival, older than the Nowruz spring new year, honouring Mehr, the spirit of friendship, kindness and light. In the Irvine area it is organised as a public cultural celebration with traditional music, dance, poetry and food, drawing the community together each autumn.
If your family’s story passed through Irvine, or any of the places Iranians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Tehran to the stone oven on Culver Drive, to wherever you are now.