On a Friday evening at Fashion Island, the valet line outside the steakhouses fills with German sedans, and somewhere in the queue a grandmother in dark sunglasses is telling her grandchildren, in Farsi, to stop running near the fountain. The Persians in Newport Beach do not announce themselves with a single street or a row of kebab houses. They live quietly inside one of the most expensive zip codes in California, in glass houses above the harbour and gated estates along the coast, and their story is one of arrival, ambition, and a culture kept alive in living rooms and at the Nowruz table.
The Place
Newport Beach sits on the Orange County coast, built around a harbour that began as a working port in the 1870s when the McFadden brothers ran a shipping trade out of McFadden Wharf. By the 1920s the port had become a playground, the Balboa Pavilion and the pier turning a freight landing into a resort.
The decades that followed pulled the city upmarket. Affluent buyers took the waterfront in the 1960s, the Irvine Company shaped master plans inland, and in 1971 Fashion Island opened as the commercial heart of Newport Center. Today the city is a collection of harbours, peninsulas, and hillside enclaves, and one of the wealthiest communities in the United States.
How It Became Persian
The Persian presence in Newport Beach is not the story of a single neighbourhood filling up. It is the story of a professional class arriving in Southern California, prospering, and choosing the coast.
The first arrivals: students who stayed
Before the revolution, Iranians came to Southern California as students. Many were young men sent to study medicine, engineering, and law, the children of families who could afford an American degree. Some finished their training, opened practices, and quietly put down roots in Los Angeles and Orange County in the early 1970s.
These early arrivals were a small, educated cohort. They were doctors who built clinics, engineers who joined the aerospace and technology firms that lined the region, and a foundation, in retrospect, for the much larger wave that followed.
1979 and the great migration
The 1979 revolution changed everything. The fall of the monarchy and the turmoil that followed sent hundreds of thousands of Iranians abroad, and Southern California received the largest share. Los Angeles became home to the biggest Iranian population outside Iran, so large it earned the nickname Tehrangeles, a story that runs through Persian enclaves from Glendale to Brentwood.
This wave was different from the students who came before. It carried whole families, many of them affluent and professional, who arrived not to study but to rebuild. They brought capital, credentials, and the expectation of starting over at the top rather than the bottom.
Why Orange County, why the coast
By 1990, Irvine and the Palos Verdes Peninsula held the largest concentrations of Iranian Muslims in the region. Irvine, with its planned neighbourhoods, strong schools, and proximity to the University of California, became the centre of Iranian Orange County, and remains so. The county’s other Persian pockets, from Calabasas over the Los Angeles line to the families spread toward San Diego, all orbit the same Southern California gravity.
Newport Beach drew the families who had succeeded. The same pull shaped the coast nearby, from the gated drives of Newport Coast to the family neighbourhoods of Laguna Niguel. As Iranian professionals moved into medicine, law, accounting, and especially real estate and construction, their wealth carried them toward the harbour and the hills above it. Newport Beach offered what the most successful immigrants wanted: a coastline, privacy, and an address that signalled they had made it.
From professionals to magnates
The arc of Iranian Newport Beach is best read through its most prominent residents. Paul Merage, born in Iran, co-founded Chef America and created Hot Pockets, then sold the company to Nestle in 2002 for 2.6 billion dollars. He settled in Newport Beach and, in 2005, gave 30 million dollars to the business school at the University of California, Irvine, which now bears his name.
Igor Olenicoff, the Russian-born property developer, and Joe Kiani, the Iranian-born founder of the Irvine medical-device maker Masimo, round out a roster of Iranian and Iranian-connected entrepreneurs who reshaped Orange County business. Merage and Olenicoff have both been counted as billionaires. They are the visible peak of a much broader professional class that quietly filled the county’s clinics, law firms, and brokerages.
What these stories share is a pattern repeated thousands of times on a smaller scale. An education obtained abroad, a practice or a business built from nothing, and a move up the coast as success compounded. The Iranian doctor with an office in Irvine, the developer who put up office parks across the county, the family that traded an apartment for a harbour-view house: each followed the same path that carried Merage from a frozen-food start-up to a 40-million-dollar mansion on the Newport coast.
An organised cultural life
As the population grew, it organised. The Network of Iranian American Professionals of Orange County, founded in the mid-1980s, became the connective tissue of the community, a non-political, non-religious nonprofit that ran cultural festivals, social gatherings, and the annual Nowruz celebrations.
Each spring the group coordinates Nowruz banners along major streets in Irvine, marking the Persian New Year in public for a community that mostly lives its culture in private. For Newport Beach families, these events anchor a calendar that revolves around the spring equinox, the haft-sin table, and the long evenings of poetry, food, and family that define Persian cultural life.
The Landmarks
Fashion Island, 401 Newport Center Drive. The open-air shopping centre that opened in 1971 is the social hub of the city, and a familiar one for Persian families who treat its restaurants, valet lines, and fountains as the unofficial town square. It is where weekend dinners happen and where the community is most visibly part of the scene.
Zood, Fashion Island Atrium Food Court. A fast-casual kitchen serving Persian-inspired California food, with gyros, doners, and shawarma carrying Persian flavours. Its arrival at Fashion Island put Iranian cooking squarely inside Newport Beach’s most prominent address.
Darbari Persian Grill, 1866 Newport Boulevard. Just across the city line near Triangle Square, Darbari has become a neighbourhood standby for chicken and shish kebab, the kind of unpretentious Persian grill where Newport families go for a midweek plate of saffron rice and koobideh.
Darya Fine Persian Cuisine, 3800 South Plaza Drive. The white-tablecloth standard of Orange County Persian dining. Its owners have run Persian restaurants in the area since 1984, and Darya itself has occupied South Coast Plaza Village since 1996, serving its signature Naderi kebab of marinated filet mignon beside an indoor waterfall. For Newport’s Iranian families it is the special-occasion table.
Panini Kabob Grill, 2333 East Coast Highway, Corona del Mar. Set on Pacific Coast Highway within reach of Fashion Island, this scratch kitchen brings Mediterranean and Persian plates to the Corona del Mar end of Newport Beach, an easy lunch stop in one of the city’s most walkable corners.
The Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. A short drive inland, the business school renamed for the Hot Pockets billionaire in 2005 is the most enduring civic mark left by an Iranian Newport Beach resident, a permanent fixture on a campus that has educated generations of Orange County’s Iranian families.
Newport Harbour. The water that defines the city is also where the community’s success is most plainly displayed, in the yachts, the waterfront homes, and the harbour-view estates that drew prosperous Iranian families to the coast in the first place.
Where They Came From
The Persians of Newport Beach trace back overwhelmingly to Tehran and Iran’s other major cities, the urban, educated, professional families who had the most to lose in 1979 and the most means to leave. They were doctors, engineers, lawyers, and businesspeople before they arrived, and they reconstituted those careers in California.
The community spans religious lines. Iranian Muslims, Iranian Jews, Baha’is, and Christians all settled in Orange County, and many of the first migrants were the student doctors of the early 1970s who later sponsored relatives in the classic pattern of chain migration. Family followed family, and the network that started with a handful of students grew into the tens of thousands counted across the county today.
Newport Beach Today
The Persians in Newport Beach remain, by design, a quiet presence. There is no Persian Square here as there is in Los Angeles, no concentrated commercial strip. The community lives dispersed across the city’s best addresses and expresses itself through profession, education, and family rather than storefront.
The centre of gravity for Iranian Orange County is still Irvine, with its Nowruz banners and its larger, denser population. Newport Beach is where the successful settle, the coastal capstone of a community whose institutions, restaurants, and cultural calendar mostly sit a few miles inland in Irvine, Costa Mesa, and Santa Ana.
That dispersal is partly a measure of how thoroughly Iranian families have folded into Orange County life. Their children attend the same schools, their businesses serve the same clients, and their presence registers less as a separate community than as a thread woven through the county’s professional class. The Persianness shows up in the details: the saffron in a home kitchen, the poetry recited at a dinner party, the spread of the haft-sin in March.
What endures is the spring. Each Nowruz the haft-sin tables appear in Newport Beach kitchens, the families gather, and a culture carried across the world in 1979 renews itself again, within sight of a harbour very far from Tehran.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Persians live in Newport Beach?
Exact figures for Newport Beach alone are not published, but Orange County is home to roughly 32,000 Iranian Americans by American Community Survey estimates. Newport Beach holds an affluent share of that population, concentrated among professional and business families rather than in a single neighbourhood.
Why did Persians settle in Newport Beach, California?
Persians in Newport Beach are largely the most successful members of Orange County’s broader Iranian community. As Iranian professionals prospered in medicine, law, and real estate after the 1979 revolution, many chose Newport Beach for its coastline, privacy, and prestige.
When did Iranians come to Orange County?
The first Iranians arrived as students in the early 1970s, many to study medicine and engineering. The large migration came after the 1979 revolution, which sent the biggest share of Iranian exiles to Southern California, including Orange County.
Is there a Persian neighbourhood in Newport Beach?
No. Unlike Los Angeles, the Persians in Newport Beach do not have a defined ethnic enclave. They live dispersed across the city’s wealthiest areas, and the denser centre of Iranian Orange County life is in nearby Irvine.
Where do Persians in Newport Beach gather and eat?
Fashion Island is the social hub, with Zood serving Persian-inspired food in its food court. Nearby, Darya in South Coast Plaza Village offers fine Persian dining, while Darbari in Newport and Panini Kabob Grill in Corona del Mar serve everyday Persian and Mediterranean plates.
Who are the most prominent Iranian residents of Newport Beach?
Paul Merage, the Iranian-born co-founder of Chef America and creator of Hot Pockets, settled in Newport Beach and gave 30 million dollars to UC Irvine’s business school, now named for him. Other major Iranian-connected figures in the area include Masimo founder Joe Kiani.
If your family’s story passed through Newport Beach, or any of the places Persians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the boulevards of Tehran to the harbour and hillside estates of the Orange County coast, to wherever you are now.