Westwood: Persian Square (Tehrangeles) and the college-town village above it

Westwood Boulevard does two completely different things on either side of Wilshire. North of Wilshire, up toward UCLA, it’s a 1929 college-town village — Diddy Riese cookies, the campus crowd, the old movie palaces. South of Wilshire, running down toward Pico, it’s the densest stretch of Iranian restaurants, markets, bakeries, and ice-cream shops in the United States — the commercial heart of the diaspora the world calls Tehrangeles; the City of Los Angeles formally marked it in 2010 by naming the Westwood Blvd × Wilkins Ave intersection “Persian Square.” One street, two neighborhoods, and the food map should keep them separate.

Tehrangeles: how it got here

Los Angeles holds the largest Iranian population of any city outside Iran, and the wave that built Persian Square arrived around and after the 1979 revolution — a diaspora heavy with professionals, business owners, and families, much of it Jewish and Muslim and Baháʼí and Armenian-Iranian, much of it with money to start over. Westwood — near UCLA, near the Westside, already cosmopolitan — was the natural landing point, and over the 1980s the stretch of Westwood Boulevard south of Wilshire filled in with Persian everything: restaurants, markets, bakeries, bookstores, music shops, satellite-TV studios. The community has since spread far beyond it — over the hill into Encino and the Valley (see encino-persian-north), out to Beverly Hills and Brentwood — but Westwood Boulevard stayed the symbolic capital, and in 2010 City Councilmember Paul Koretz had the city designate the Westwood-and-Wilkins corner “Persian Square,” with the trilingual signage to match ^[1][2][3].

One naming rule, non-negotiable: these are Persian / Iranian restaurants and markets. Do not ever label any of them “Israeli.” (The diaspora includes a large Persian-Jewish community — many of whom you’ll find more on the Pico-Robertson kosher corridor than on Westwood Blvd — but “Persian-Jewish” is still Persian, and the cuisine is Iranian.)

The Persian Square row

The strip’s anchors run the full Iranian register:

• Restaurants — Shamshiri Grill (1712 Westwood, opened 1982 — among the oldest on the strip; it actually started in what’s now Thai Town and moved to Westwood about two years later; tahchin, the saffron-rice cake), Shaherzad (1422 Westwood — the in-house tanour oven turning out fresh bread, the full chelo kabab canon), Attari Sandwich Shop (1388 Westwood — 30-plus years of cheap Persian sandwiches, with a Saturday spread of ash-e reshteh and gondi in the courtyard), and the newer kabob specialists like Taste of Tehran a few blocks up.
• Bastani / ice cream — Saffron & Rose (1387 Westwood) is the LA Persian ice-cream shop: saffron-rosewater, lavender, the pistachio register, and faloodeh (the rosewater-and-vermicelli sorbet). It’s part of a tiny LA category that also includes Mashti Malone’s over on La Brea in Hollywood (the akbar-mashti style) — two shops, one distinct format.
• Coffee houses and bakeries — Naab and the other Persian coffee houses (saffron drinks, Persian sweets, Turkish-style coffee, the social-scene-as-much-as-the-coffee that the chai-khaneh idea carries into LA); plus the bakeries with their sangak and barbari counters and the saffron-and-cardamom pastry cases.
• Markets — Persian grocers along and near the corridor (and Jordan Market just off it on Santa Monica Blvd) — fresh herbs by the bunch, dried limes, sumac, barberries, pomegranate molasses, the dairy and pickles a Persian pantry runs on, plus hot delis and fresh-baked bread.
• The cultural anchors — Ketab Corp and the other Persian bookstores, the music shops — not food, but they’re why the strip reads as a real cultural district and not just a restaurant block.

Westwood Village, north of Wilshire — a different sub-collection

Above Wilshire is the UCLA college town: the 1929 planned village with its theaters (the Fox/Regency, the Bruin), Diddy Riese (926 Broxton — the cookie-ice-cream-sandwich institution with the eternal line), and one quiet bit of LA food history — the Westwood Village store of The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, where the Ice Blended was invented in 1987 (see coffee-bean-tea-leaf-la-origin). Stan’s Donuts, a Village fixture, closed in 2020. None of this is Persian — it’s a separate curatorial layer, and the directory shouldn’t blur it into Tehrangeles just because it’s the same street name.

Why it’s in the directory this way

Westwood Boulevard is two curatorial collections, not one: “Persian Square” / Tehrangeles (Westwood Blvd, Wilshire to Pico — the post-1979 Iranian diaspora’s commercial heart; Shamshiri, Shaherzad, Attari, Saffron & Rose, the coffee houses, the markets, Ketab Corp) and Westwood Village (north of Wilshire, the UCLA college town; Diddy Riese, the Coffee Bean Ice Blended origin store, the theaters). Carry the Persian Square places by tradition — Persian / Iranian — pair the collection with encino-persian-north (where much of the community now actually lives) and the broader Persian-LA notes, and never let the word “Israeli” near any of it.

Draft — Search session, 2026-05-11. Citations hardened: the “Persian Square” designation is confirmed — the City of LA named the Westwood Blvd × Wilkins Ave intersection “Persian Square” in 2010 via Councilmember Paul Koretz (Wikipedia “Tehrangeles” / Discover LA); Shamshiri Grill opened 1982 (started in present-day Thai Town, moved to Westwood ~2 years later) — the “since 1981 / oldest on the strip” line has been corrected; Attari’s 30-plus-years figure is corroborated by Discover LA. Founder still to confirm: the Coffee Bean Ice Blended-at-the-Westwood-store-in-1987 detail (carried in coffee-bean-tea-leaf-la-origin) and the Westwood Village 1929 founding date. Companions: encino-persian-north, coffee-bean-tea-leaf-la-origin, the Persian-Armenian-Levantine LA notes, the Westside corridors neighborhood note.