The drive up to Newport Coast climbs out of the marine layer and into the light. Past the gates, the lawns turn emerald and the rooflines turn terracotta, and somewhere behind one of those Tuscan facades a grandmother is folding herbs into rice for a dinner that will not start until nine. The Persians in Newport Coast did not build a Tehrangeles here. They did something quieter: they bought the view, and they brought the kitchen.
The Place
Newport Coast is a master-planned enclave inside the city of Newport Beach, draped across the San Joaquin Hills above Crystal Cove State Park. The Irvine Company carved it out of the old Irvine Ranch in the late 1980s and 1990s, building roughly 4,000 homes on 7,700 acres and preserving about three-quarters of the land as open space.
It became part of Newport Beach by annexation effective on the first day of 2002. By the 2010 census the area held close to 9,700 residents, with a median household income above $160,000 and a population that was nearly a fifth Asian and visibly Middle Eastern.
This is not a neighbourhood of corner shops and walk-in temples. It is a neighbourhood of gates: Pelican Hill, Crystal Cove, Pelican Crest, Pelican Ridge. The Persian story here is told indoors, and at the markets and restaurants a few minutes inland.
How It Became Persian
The exodus that started in Los Angeles
The first large wave of Iranians reached Southern California after the 1979 revolution, and most of them landed in Los Angeles. Westwood became the world’s most famous Iranian neighbourhood, the place outsiders nicknamed Tehrangeles, dense with bookshops, kebab houses and satellite television studios broadcasting back to Iran.
But Los Angeles was a first stop, not always a final one. As the generation that arrived in their thirties and forties built businesses and sent children to university, many began looking south down the coast for something calmer, newer and greener. The wealthiest had options at both ends: the established luxury of Persian Beverly Hills to the north, and the fresh master-planned hills of Orange County to the south.
Why Orange County pulled them down the coast
Orange County offered what West Los Angeles could not: new construction, master-planned safety, top public schools and a short commute to nothing in particular. By the 2000s the county held one of the largest Iranian populations in the United States, anchored by Irvine, which on its own counts roughly 11,000 Iranian Americans, among the highest of any city in the country.
Estimates for the wider county run far higher than the census figure of about 32,000, with community researchers putting the real number well into the hundreds of thousands. Many Iranian Americans simply decline to mark the box, a habit born of caution that has long muddied the count.
The Newport Coast generation
Newport Coast sits at the top of that southward migration, financially and geographically. The Iranians who bought here were rarely first-off-the-plane arrivals. They were physicians from Hoag Hospital, engineers and developers, lawyers, dentists and finance professionals who had already spent a decade or two in the country before the gates opened in the 1990s.
One name captures the type. Fariborz Maseeh, an Iranian-born pioneer of microelectromechanical systems who turned engineering into finance, ran his investment firm in Newport Beach and, in 2005, endowed a centre for Persian studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the kind of resident this hillside attracts: technical, philanthropic and quietly tied to the homeland through scholarship rather than nostalgia.
The community that formed up here is mixed in faith and uniform in outlook. It is largely secular, including Muslims who rarely attend a mosque, a substantial number of Iranian Jews, and smaller Baha’i and Zoroastrian families. What binds them is not religion but a shared inheritance of language, table and ambition.
That blend is itself a legacy of the exodus. The revolution drove out Iranians of every creed, and the ones who could afford a hillside in Newport Coast had usually been comfortable in Tehran long before they were comfortable here. They arrived with the manners of a cosmopolitan capital intact, and they rebuilt that world quietly, one dinner party at a time.
What the children did
The clearest measure of the settlement is in the schools. Newport Coast Elementary, a Newport-Mesa Unified school of fewer than 500 children, feeds into Corona del Mar High, one of the strongest public high schools in the county. The independent Sage Hill School, which opened in 2000, sits within Newport Coast itself and draws heavily from these families.
Persian parents here treated education the way their own parents had treated it in Tehran: as the one asset no revolution could confiscate. The second generation went to UC Irvine, UCLA, USC and the Ivies, and many came back to practise medicine and law within a few miles of the houses they grew up in.
The Landmarks
Wholesome Choice, 18040 Culver Drive, Irvine. The cultural anchor for Persians across south Orange County, a short drive inland from Newport Coast. Its four-foot loaves of sangak come off the oven all day, and the prepared-food counter serves baghali polo and joojeh kabob to people who could afford a chef but want their mother’s version instead.
Darya Fine Persian Cuisine, South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa. The white-tablecloth Persian restaurant of choice for the Newport set, set inside the most luxurious shopping centre on the West Coast. It is where engagements are announced and Nowruz dinners are booked weeks ahead, with the saffron rice arriving in a golden dome of tahdig.
Pelican Hill, Newport Coast. The Irvine Company resort and golf club whose Italianate rotunda and ocean views have become the unofficial backdrop of Persian Newport Coast. Weddings here run to several hundred guests, the dancing to the small hours, and the live band as likely to play a Googoosh number as a first dance.
Fashion Island, Newport Center, Newport Beach. The open-air mall below the hills, where the families do the ordinary errands of an affluent life. It functions as a daytime promenade, a place to be seen between a doctor’s appointment and a dinner reservation.
Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, UC Irvine. Founded in 2005 through an endowment from Fariborz Maseeh and the Massiah Foundation, it is the intellectual home of Persian Orange County. It hosts lectures, supports research across the Persianate world, and gives the diaspora’s children a scholarly mirror for a heritage their parents carried out by suitcase.
Great Park Live, 8000 Great Park Boulevard, Irvine. Each autumn the Network of Iranian American Professionals of Orange County stages Mehregan here, the Persian harvest festival, with music, folk dance and a bazaar. For a community without a single street to call its own, the two-day festival is the closest thing to a town square.
Crystal Cove State Park, Newport Coast. The protected coastline and historic cottage colony directly below the gated villages. The trails and tidepools are the shared backyard, the place where the grandchildren of Tehran learn to surf.
Where They Came From
Most of Newport Coast’s Iranians trace their roots to Tehran and the larger provincial cities, Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz, the urban professional class that had the means and the foresight to leave around the revolution. They were not village migrants chasing farm work. They were the educated middle and upper-middle class of a country in upheaval.
That origin explains the shape of the community. People who arrive already holding degrees and capital tend to skip the immigrant gateway neighbourhood and move straight toward good schools and rising property. Newport Coast, born new in the 1990s with no entrenched establishment, was perfectly timed for a generation that wanted to start clean.
There is a continuity worth noticing in the choices. The same families who once lived a few streets apart in north Tehran now live a few canyons apart above Crystal Cove. The networks of friendship and marriage that formed in Iran did not dissolve in the crossing; they reassembled along the coast, and the dinner invitations still travel down the same lines they always did.
Newport Coast Today
Today the Persian presence in Newport Coast is real but dispersed, the way wealth tends to be. There is no Persian high street up here and there never will be. The visible life of the community happens a few minutes downhill, in Irvine and Costa Mesa, while the houses on the ridge stay private behind their gates.
The rhythms still run on the Persian calendar. Nowruz, the spring new year, fills the dining rooms in March, the haft-sin table laid with its sprouting wheat and goldfish. Come autumn, the families drive up to the Great Park for Mehregan. The grandparents speak Farsi, the parents switch, and the youngest answer in English without thinking.
It is worth being honest about what this place is. The Newport Coast Persians are among the most assimilated and most affluent of any Iranian community in America, and assimilation has a cost: a community spread thin enough that it can be hard to find. But the markets are full on a Saturday, the festival grows every year, and the link to a city like nearby Persian Irvine keeps the culture within easy reach. The same pattern repeats in neighbouring enclaves like Persian Laguna Niguel down the coast. Up here, heritage is a choice you make, not an address you live at.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there many Persians in Newport Coast?
Yes, though they are dispersed rather than concentrated. The Persians in Newport Coast form part of one of the largest Iranian American populations in the country, centred on Orange County, but they live behind the gates of communities like Pelican Hill and Crystal Cove rather than along any single Persian street.
Why did Iranians settle in Newport Coast?
The Persians in Newport Coast came mostly as established professionals moving south from Los Angeles, drawn by new master-planned homes, safety, top public schools and a short reach to the Iranian institutions of Irvine. The enclave’s gates first opened in the 1990s, perfectly timed for a generation ready to put down wealthier roots.
Where do Persians in Newport Coast shop and eat?
Most drive a few minutes inland. Wholesome Choice in Irvine is the main Persian market for groceries and prepared food, while Darya at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa is the favoured upscale restaurant for celebrations and Nowruz dinners.
What religions do the Persians of Newport Coast practise?
The community is mixed and largely secular. It includes non-observant Muslims, a substantial Iranian Jewish presence, and smaller Baha’i and Zoroastrian families, bound together more by language and culture than by any single faith.
How is Newport Coast connected to the larger Irvine Persian community?
Closely. Irvine, just inland, holds roughly 11,000 Iranian Americans and serves as the cultural hub, with markets, the UC Irvine Persian studies centre and the annual Mehregan festival. Newport Coast functions as the affluent residential edge of that wider Orange County Iranian world.
What festivals does the community celebrate?
The two anchors are Nowruz, the Persian new year in March, celebrated at home with the haft-sin table, and Mehregan, the autumn harvest festival staged by NIPOC at the Great Park in Irvine. Both draw Persian families from across Newport Coast and the surrounding cities.
If your family’s story passed through Newport Coast, or any of the places Persians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the apartments of Tehran to the gated hills above Crystal Cove, to wherever you are now.