RESTAURANT REVIEW : Pamchal: Competition in the Persian Gulch

There’s exotic and there’s exotic. Ten years ago, Iranian cuisine was exotic. Now that there are plenty of Iranian restaurants, it’s not exotic at all: beef shish kebab with rice pilaf, chicken shish kebab with rice pilaf, lamb shish kebab with rice pilaf. Sometimes chicken stewed with walnuts and pomegranate juice, usually very good, or meat stewed with greens, usually very dull.

Am I complaining about the limited menu? Of course. I understand it, though. Iran has no native restaurant tradition to speak of. In the days of the Shah, Americans used to say eating your way across Iran was like eating your way across Nevada.

However, in the Persian Gulch that is Westwood Boulevard there are getting to be so many Iranian restaurants that a little competition is brewing, and we have places with real specialties. The most distinctive seems to be Pamchal, which refers to its cuisine, for some reason, as “Caspian and Continental.” The “Continental” part I don’t understand (unless it refers to Asia, certainly one of our major continents), but Pamchal does serve a distinctive Iranian regional cuisine, that of the provinces on the Caspian Sea.

The Caspian being a body of water, Pamchal serves a couple of fish dishes, rare on other Iranian menus. The Caspian is also where the famous Iranian caviar comes from, of course, and Pamchal has a specialty in caviar (served Russian-style, with little pancakes; there are a few other hints of Russian culinary influence as well).

Otherwise, the most distinctive thing about the Caspian region is its love of garlic, which is thought to be due to the damp climate of the area (I’m only repeating what the waiter told me). There must be 30 garlic braids on the walls at Pamchal, and quite a few dishes are rather garlicky. You can even order crunchy, savagely sour pickled garlic cloves as a condiment. Probably the most garlicky entree is mirza ghasemi, a plush, mellow, faintly tart dish of eggplant more or less pureed with tomato and egg.

The best entree, garlic aside, might be morghe torshe, a famous specialty of the Caspian region that is chicken in a tart spinach and cilantro sauce, or it might be fesenjon, Cornish game hen with a sauce of pureed walnuts and pomegranate juice. Unexpectedly there is a tasty vegetarian entree called baghala ghatogh, dried lima beans in a sweet-sour dill sauce.

The fish dishes are on the plain side: a sturgeon kebab (which tasted suspiciously like salmon to me) with lemon to squeeze on it, and broiled whitefish with a savagely sour pomegranate sauce. I think the more usual Iranian shish kebabs are actually better, filet mignon marinated in saffron and onion juice and a particularly saffrony (and lemony) chicken kebab.

The dessert list is remarkably long, so long that Pamchal even offers a dessert combo plate consisting of a syrup-soaked fritter (zolabia) and a sort of syrup-soaked hushpuppy (bamyeh), an elegant crisp-fried crepe somewhat like an Italian crispelle, a rosewater-flavored cornstarch candy called masghati and a very odd candy called ranginak, which has walnuts in it but basically consists of flour fried dark brown.

In defiance of the Ayatollah, Pamchal has a wine list, but for my money, the most interesting drink is cucumber sharbat, a cooling, soothing, slightly sweet iced drink flavored with cucumber. If people can drink celery tonic, why not cucumber?

Pamchal, 1389 Westwood Blvd., Westwood, (213) 473-0309. Open for lunch and dinner daily. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, $10 to $36.