Drive west along Ventura Boulevard on a Friday afternoon and the signage tells the story before the people do: saffron-coloured awnings, Farsi script beside English, the smell of grilled koobideh drifting from doorways near the corner of Balboa. The Persians in Encino did not arrive to a blank canvas. They settled into one of Los Angeles’ oldest and most comfortable suburbs and, over four decades, made it unmistakably their own.
The Place
Encino sits in the southern San Fernando Valley, tucked against the Santa Monica Mountains, about twenty minutes over the hill from Beverly Hills when the 405 cooperates. It is a neighbourhood of mature trees, deep lots and quiet money, the sort of place where ranch houses from the 1950s share streets with gated contemporary estates.
The name comes from the Spanish for the holm oaks that shaded the valley floor. Long before that, the Tongva village of Siutcanga, “the place of the oaks,” stood here, and in 1845 governor Pio Pico granted the land as Rancho Los Encinos.
Today Encino is among the more affluent corners of the city of Los Angeles, with household incomes well above the regional median. It is also, quietly, one of the most Iranian places in America: of all foreign-born residents in Encino, more were born in Iran than in any other country.
How It Became Persian
The Persian Encino is a creation of a single historical rupture, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and of the decades of arrivals that followed it.
Before the revolution
A handful of Iranians lived in Los Angeles before 1979, mostly students and a small professional class drawn by the universities and the weather. They were a few thousand at most, scattered, with no neighbourhood to call theirs. The Valley in those years was suburban America at its most archetypal, citrus groves giving way to tract homes, and Encino was already its prosperous southern flank.
The exodus
When the monarchy fell in February 1979 and the Islamic Republic took its place, the people who left first were the ones the new order had the least room for: the secular professional class, the business owners, the religious minorities. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians fled, and a great many of them came to Southern California.
They did not all land in the same place. The Westside, anchored by Westwood, became the commercial heart that the world would later nickname Tehrangeles. But for families who wanted space, schools and a house with a yard, the southern Valley made more sense than a Westwood high-rise. The early wave spread across the affluent towns nearest the hills, and Encino, with neighbouring Tarzana, became the Valley’s Persian centre of gravity. Others put down roots in the older Persian neighbourhood of Westwood itself, or further south in the planned suburbs of Irvine.
Building a community
What made Encino stick was that the arrivals were not poor. Iranian Americans nationally post per-capita incomes and college-attainment rates well above the national average, and the doctors, engineers, lawyers and merchants who reached the Valley in the 1980s could buy in Encino almost immediately. A Persian-language newspaper, Asr-e Emruz, has been published in Encino since that decade, a small but telling sign that this was a place where Iranians intended to stay, not pass through. Word of mouth did the rest. A family who bought a house on a leafy street near a good school would tell a cousin, who told a colleague, until whole sections of the southern Valley filled with Iranian neighbours who recognised one another at the market and the school gate.
The community that formed was never a single thing. It held secular Iranians who left religion in Iran, observant Muslims, a large and tightly knit Iranian Jewish population, Armenians and a scattering of Baha’is. What they shared was the Persian language, a cuisine, a calendar and the memory of a country they could not easily return to.
The Jewish thread
The Iranian Jewish presence in Encino deserves its own line. Persian Jews, a community with roots in Iran going back more than two and a half thousand years, were among those with the most reason to leave after 1979, and Los Angeles received the largest concentration of them anywhere outside Israel.
Many settled on the Westside, near the grand congregations of Beverly Hills, while others joined the older Jewish neighbourhoods such as Fairfax. But the Valley drew thousands too, and in 2004 Rabbi Dovid Loloyan founded Haichal Moshe, a Sephardic Persian congregation, to serve them where they actually lived, on Ventura Boulevard in the middle of Encino.
The Landmarks
Sadaf Restaurant, 16240 Ventura Boulevard. Opened in 2011, Sadaf is the polished face of Persian Encino: white tablecloths, a full bar, a patio and platters of saffron rice and grilled meats. It draws the Valley’s Persian families for birthdays and engagements as readily as it draws curious neighbours, and it has become a reference point for what contemporary Iranian dining in the Valley looks like.
Cabaret Tehran, 16101 Ventura Boulevard. A few doors west, Cabaret Tehran is the older idea of a Persian night out: dinner, live music and dancing, the kind of room where a singer works through the standards of pre-revolution Tehran while the floor fills. It is nostalgia made into a business, and for an older generation it is a way back to a city that no longer exists in the form they remember.
Sabzee Mediterranean Market, 17461 Ventura Boulevard. The everyday anchor. Sabzee stocks the Persian pantry in full, the herbs, the dried limes, the barberries, the fresh sangak bread, alongside Israeli, Russian and broader Middle Eastern goods, with kosher and halal lines on the same shelves. It is where the week’s cooking begins for a large slice of the neighbourhood.
Haichal Moshe, 18042 Ventura Boulevard. The Persian synagogue at the heart of the Valley community, founded by Rabbi Dovid Loloyan in 2004. It made a deliberate choice to plant itself in Encino rather than follow the prestige addresses over the hill, putting an Iranian Jewish house of worship within walking distance of the homes it serves.
The Sepulveda Basin and Lake Balboa, off Balboa Boulevard. Every spring, on the thirteenth and final day of the Persian new year, Iranian families across Los Angeles decamp to the outdoors for Sizdah Bedar, a picnic that wards off bad luck by spending the day in nature. The green expanse of the Sepulveda Basin in Encino has become one of the Valley’s great gathering grounds for the occasion, blankets and samovars spread under the trees.
Lanai Road Elementary School, 4241 Lanai Road. Not a Persian institution, but a Persian magnet all the same. Encino’s public schools rank among the strongest in California, and Lanai Road sits in the top tier statewide. For immigrant families who staked everything on the next generation’s education, addresses zoned for schools like this one were a large part of why they chose Encino at all.
Where They Came From
The Persians of Encino came overwhelmingly from Tehran, the capital that emptied its professional and minority classes after 1979. Unlike older immigrant flows, this was not chain migration from a single village. It was an urban, educated population leaving a capital city, which is part of why the community arrived already fluent in the habits of modern professional life.
The religious minorities followed their own logic. Iranian Jews left in disproportionate numbers, as did Baha’is, who faced outright persecution under the new order, and Armenian Christians. Each brought a slightly different Iran with them, but all spoke Persian and kept the same new-year calendar, which is why the community in Encino reads as one even when it is several.
Many had passed through other places first, Israel, Europe, the American East Coast, before the gravitational pull of Southern California’s existing Iranian population drew them to the Valley. By the time they reached Encino, the neighbourhood was already Persian enough to feel like a soft landing.
Encino Today
Encino in 2026 is a place where the Persian presence is woven into the ordinary fabric rather than fenced off into a single block. There is no Persian gate or arch announcing an enclave. Instead there is the steady accumulation of Farsi on storefronts, the markets, the synagogues, the restaurants, the doctors’ offices with Iranian names on the directory, spread along Ventura Boulevard and through the residential streets above it.
The relationship with the Westside remains close. Families maintain ties to the grander institutions of Beverly Hills and the commercial bustle of Westwood, and many move freely between the two worlds. But the Valley Persians are not simply a spillover from over the hill. They built something with its own centre of gravity, more residential, more family-oriented, less on display.
Recent events have tested the community’s composure, as the politics of Iran and the Middle East ripple through a population that holds Muslims, Jews and the secular in the same neighbourhood. So far Encino has largely held together, bound by language, food and the shared experience of having left. Four decades in, the children of the 1979 arrivals are now raising children of their own here, third-generation Encino Persians for whom Ventura Boulevard is simply home.
The texture of that home is specific. It is the bakery counter at Sabzee on a Friday morning, the haft-sin tables in living-room windows each March, the singer at Cabaret Tehran working through songs older than the people requesting them. It is also the doctors’ shingles and law-firm names along Ventura that read like a Tehran phone book. None of it announces itself as an enclave, and that understatement is exactly the point: in Encino, being Persian is not a spectacle but a settled fact of the place.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Persians live in Encino?
There is no exact count for the Persians in Encino, but Iran is the single most common birthplace among the neighbourhood’s foreign-born residents. The wider San Fernando Valley is home to tens of thousands of Iranians, and Encino with neighbouring Tarzana forms its acknowledged centre.
Why did so many Iranians settle in Encino?
The Persians in Encino arrived largely after the 1979 revolution, drawn by the Valley’s space, top-ranked public schools and proximity to the existing Iranian community on the Westside. As an affluent, educated immigrant group, many could buy homes in Encino almost immediately.
Is the Persian community in Encino Muslim or Jewish?
Both, and more. Encino’s Iranian population includes secular Iranians, observant Muslims, a large Iranian Jewish community served by congregations such as Haichal Moshe, as well as Armenian Christians and Baha’is. What unites them is the Persian language and culture rather than a single religion.
Where can I find Persian food in Encino?
Ventura Boulevard is the spine of Persian dining in Encino. Sadaf Restaurant at 16240 Ventura offers a contemporary sit-down experience, Cabaret Tehran at 16101 Ventura pairs dinner with live music, and Sabzee Mediterranean Market at 17461 Ventura stocks the full Persian pantry for home cooks.
How is Encino different from Tehrangeles in Westwood?
Tehrangeles, centred on Westwood Boulevard, is the dense commercial heart of Iranian Los Angeles. Encino is its residential counterpart in the Valley: quieter, more family-oriented, built around homes and schools rather than shopfronts, though the two communities are closely linked.
How do Persians in Encino celebrate Nowruz?
Nowruz, the Persian new year, begins at the spring equinox and runs thirteen days. Families set a haft-sin table at home, and on the final day, Sizdah Bedar, they gather outdoors for a picnic, with the Sepulveda Basin in Encino among the Valley’s most popular gathering grounds.
If your family’s story passed through Encino, or any of the places Persians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the streets of Tehran to a house above Ventura Boulevard, to wherever you are now.