Walk south on Westwood Boulevard from Wilshire, past the Hammer Museum, and within two blocks the signage shifts. Storefronts switch to a flowing Persian script, the smell of grilling saffron kebab drifts onto the pavement, and a small blue street sign tells you where you are: Persian Square. This is the original heart of the Persians in Westwood, the commercial spine that earned Los Angeles the nickname Tehrangeles long before the name spread to the suburbs.
The Place
Westwood sits on the Westside of Los Angeles, wedged between Beverly Hills, Bel Air and Santa Monica, with the University of California, Los Angeles anchoring its northern edge. It has always been desirable real estate: leafy, central, expensive, and close to the campus that draws students and professors from around the world.
The Persian district is not the whole neighbourhood. It is a tight commercial corridor on Westwood Boulevard, roughly between Wilshire Boulevard and Pico Boulevard, south of the village proper. A few blocks of restaurants, bookshops, grocers and ice cream counters do the cultural work that a much larger enclave does elsewhere.
How It Became Persian
The story of Iranians in Westwood begins quietly and then arrives all at once.
Before the revolution: students and the Shah’s middle class
A Persian presence took root in Westwood in the 1960s, drawn by UCLA. The campus pulled in Iranian students under the Shah’s modernising programmes, when oil money sent a generation abroad to study engineering, medicine and law. Many came intending to return home. The boulevard offered them a place to buy familiar food and hear their own language a long way from Tehran.
By the 1970s this was a comfortable, professional community of students and well-to-do families, small but established. Nobody yet called it Tehrangeles. The few Persian shops on the boulevard served a population that still measured its future in semesters and return tickets, not exile.
1979: exile changes everything
The Iranian Revolution rewrote the map. When Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran in February 1979 and the monarchy fell, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iranians changed overnight. The new theocratic state stripped away freedoms that secular professionals, religious minorities and the Westernised elite had taken for granted.
They left in waves, often expecting to return within months and discovering, year by year, that the door had closed behind them. A great many of them came to Los Angeles, drawn by climate, by relatives who had studied here, and by the simple fact that others were going too. The city already had the seed of a community in Westwood, so the boulevard became the obvious place to land. Students who had come to study suddenly found themselves the established old hands, helping newcomers find apartments and lawyers. Greater Los Angeles now holds the largest concentration of Iranians anywhere outside Iran, an estimated half a million or more across the metropolitan area (see the history of Tehrangeles).
A community of many faiths
The Iranians who settled here were not one congregation. Among them were Muslims, a large and influential Jewish population, Baha’is fleeing outright persecution, Armenian Christians and Zoroastrians. The exodus of Iran’s Jews was especially dramatic: of roughly 100,000 before the revolution, an estimated 80,000 left, and Los Angeles became home to the largest Iranian Jewish community in the United States, today numbering around 40,000. The same exile reshaped Jewish neighbourhoods across the city, from the established corridors of Fairfax to newer Persian Jewish strongholds.
What bound these groups together on Westwood Boulevard was not religion but a shared language, cuisine, music and the ache of a country they could not easily go back to. The shops served everyone. A Muslim family and a Jewish family might buy their sangak and dried limes from the same grocer, argue about the same poets, and mourn the same lost Tehran. In Iran the communities had often kept apart; in exile, on a few blocks of the Westside, they discovered how much they held in common.
From boulevard to suburb
As families prospered through the 1980s and 1990s, many moved outward to Beverly Hills, Encino, Tarzana and the San Fernando Valley, and later south to Irvine and Orange County. The residential centre of gravity drifted away from Westwood. The boulevard, however, stayed put as the commercial and cultural heart, the place people drove back to for groceries, books and a proper plate of chelo kabab.
Persian Square
The recognition came in 2010. On 26 February that year, the City of Los Angeles officially co-named the intersection of Westwood Boulevard and Wilkins Avenue as Persian Square, a motion led by City Councilmember Paul Koretz (Westwood Boulevard, Wikipedia). After three decades, the community’s first American home had its name on a sign.
The Landmarks
Persian Square, Westwood Boulevard at Wilkins Avenue. The blue street sign marks the symbolic centre of Tehrangeles, dedicated in February 2010. It is a small marker for a large thing: the formal acknowledgement that this stretch of asphalt is one of the most important Iranian places in the diaspora.
Shamshiri Grill, 1712 Westwood Boulevard. A Westwood institution serving Los Angeles since 1981, Shamshiri is where many Angelenos had their first koobideh kebab. The portions are famously enormous, the lamb shank falls off the bone, and you can watch the skewers sizzle on the open grill as you wait.
Attari Sandwich Shop, 1388 Westwood Boulevard. A counter-service favourite known for its osh, its tongue sandwich and its small back patio shaded by trees. Attari trades in the unpretentious comfort food of Tehran rather than banquet fare, and generations of UCLA students have eaten lunch here between classes.
Saffron & Rose Ice Cream, Westwood Boulevard. The bastani here is the real thing: a chewy, rose-and-saffron Persian ice cream studded with pistachio and frozen cream, made in a family tradition reaching back to 1974. The flavour list runs to dozens, from cucumber to lavender, and the tiny shop is almost always crowded.
Ketabsara Persian Bookstore, 1441 Westwood Boulevard. Open since 1988, Ketabsara sells Persian books, poetry, music and calligraphy, and it has long served as a lifeline to a literature that censors in Iran try to suppress. For exiles, a Persian bookshop is not a luxury but a way of keeping a language alive.
The Persian grocers of Westwood Boulevard. Markets such as Jordan Market and Tehran Market line the corridor, their shelves stocked with sumac, dried limes, sangak bread, sour cherries and pistachios. They are where the food at Shamshiri and Attari begins, and where families assemble the Haft Sin table each spring.
UCLA, north end of Westwood. The university that first drew Iranian students in the 1960s remains central. Its Iranian Student Group and the Farhang Foundation, founded in 2008, host a Nowruz celebration on campus that has grown into the largest Persian New Year festival in the country, drawing tens of thousands for music, dance, poetry and a giant Haft Sin table each spring.
Where They Came From
The first arrivals came overwhelmingly from Tehran and the cosmopolitan, educated classes of Iran’s major cities. They were the doctors, engineers, merchants and students of the Shah’s expanding middle class, people already oriented toward the West.
After 1979 the migration broadened to include those with the most to fear from the new regime: secular professionals, the wealthy, and religious minorities. Iranian Jews, many with roots going back millennia in Persia, and Baha’is, facing official persecution, were heavily represented in the exodus.
What they shared was the Persian language, a refined culinary tradition, and a deep attachment to poetry and music. Those things, more than any single faith or province, are what Westwood Boulevard was built to hold.
Westwood Today
The Persians in Westwood are now a community that mostly lives elsewhere and gathers here. The residential heart has moved to Beverly Hills, the Valley and beyond, while the boulevard remains the cultural anchor: the place for a Nowruz grocery run, a Saturday lunch, a Persian novel, a tub of saffron ice cream.
The corridor has weathered loss. The long-running bookstore Ketab Corp closed in 2017 after 36 years, and rising rents and changing tastes press on the older shops. Yet new businesses keep opening, and a second and third generation of Iranian Americans, raised in Los Angeles, treat the boulevard as inheritance rather than refuge.
It is also a barometer of the homeland. When news from Iran turns grim, the restaurants of Westwood fill with people who come not just to eat but to be among their own, near the small blue sign that says, in two languages, that they belong here.
For all the dispersal across the Westside and the Valley, the boulevard endures because no single suburb can replace it. A grocer in Encino can sell sumac, but it cannot sell the feeling of walking past a dozen Persian storefronts in a row, hearing the language on every corner, and knowing that this short stretch of Los Angeles was the first place exile turned into home.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the Persian community in Westwood, Los Angeles?
The Persians in Westwood are concentrated along Westwood Boulevard south of Wilshire, roughly between Wilshire and Pico. This commercial corridor, officially co-named Persian Square at Wilkins Avenue, is the original heart of what Angelenos call Tehrangeles.
Why is it called Tehrangeles?
Tehrangeles blends Tehran and Los Angeles. The nickname grew after the 1979 Iranian Revolution sent hundreds of thousands of Iranians to Los Angeles, which now holds the largest Iranian population outside Iran. Westwood Boulevard was the community’s first commercial centre.
When did Iranians settle in Westwood?
A Persian presence began in the 1960s, drawn by UCLA, but the community grew enormously after the 1979 revolution. Exiles of many faiths arrived through the 1980s, making the Persians in Westwood the founding population of Tehrangeles before many later moved to the suburbs.
What is Persian Square?
Persian Square is the official co-naming of the intersection of Westwood Boulevard and Wilkins Avenue, dedicated by the City of Los Angeles on 26 February 2010 under a motion by Councilmember Paul Koretz. It formally recognises the boulevard as the centre of the city’s Iranian community.
What are the best Persian restaurants in Westwood?
Long-standing favourites include Shamshiri Grill at 1712 Westwood Boulevard, serving Persian kebabs and stews since 1981, and Attari Sandwich Shop at 1388 Westwood Boulevard for casual Tehran-style food. Saffron & Rose is the place for traditional Persian saffron and rose ice cream.
How is Westwood different from Persian Beverly Hills?
Westwood Boulevard is the original commercial and cultural core, where the community first gathered and still shops and dines. Beverly Hills became a major residential centre as families prospered. We cover that community separately in our piece on the Persians in Beverly Hills, just as we trace the older East Coast enclave of Persians in Great Neck.
If your family’s story passed through Westwood, or any of the places Persians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Tehran left behind in 1979, to a blue sign on Westwood Boulevard, to wherever you are now.