Like Moths to the Flame

Of all the ethnic neighborhoods in the Southland, one of the best-known is at the same time one of the least touristed: Westwood Boulevard’s strip of Iranian shops and restaurants, a quarter-mile of signs in curling Farsi script located south of the skyscrapers and megaplex movie theaters, at just about the area where you can find vacant parking spots on a Westwood Saturday night. Some of the best Iranian cafes stay open until long after the late show; some of the boutiques and grocery stores sell exotic items you’d never expect to find within a block or two of All American Burger.

Shahrzad Flame is a sleek, modern restaurant smack in the middle of the strip, all clean lines and slick surfaces, with chicly dressed customers, candles everywhere and tables speckled robin’s egg blue. Iranian-American pop--stuff that sounds sort of like Julio Iglesias with a head-cold pours out of the stereo, sometimes alternating with circa ’81 New Wave hits. There will always be at least one guy, munching on a jumbo steak sandwich, who chatters animatedly into his cellular phone.

The cornerstone of Shahrzad Flame--the reason you pay a couple more bucks per person here than you do at the sister restaurant a couple of doors north--is a spherical, tandoor-type oven that looks like a giant blue eyeball, set under a massive cylindrical ventilation hood. Into the oven go sheets of dough, big pizza-crust-looking things. Out of it comes fragrant sheets of soft, hot flatbread, perforated like matzoh and mottled with crisp bits of carbonized char, that are brought to your table until you burst.

To nibble with the bread, you might try sabzi khordan , which is a platter of fresh raw herbs and a slice or two of salty feta cheese; or torshi liteh , a powerfully sour marinated-vegetable salsa; or a whole head of raw, tender marinated garlic. If you manage to eat it before it stiffens, the bread, called tanori , is among the most seductive Middle Eastern breads around.

To most people, Iranian cuisine means more or less this: kebabs. A fancy place might skewer and grill lamb and filetmignon as well as ground beef and chicken. A really swank joint might come up with a Cornish hen or two. Shahrzad has kebabs--pretty good ones in fact--but they’re about the least interesting food in the restaurant, little more than charcoally chunks of marinated protein that help you get down the humongous mountains of egg-yolk-stained Iranian rice.

Better to start with borani , what the menu calls “eggplant delight,” an extremely tasty glop of fried eggplant and sesame paste, topped with Shahrzad’s signature tangle of blackened fried onion. Grape leaf bundles (dolmeh ) are stuffed with meat, raisins and pungent Iranian spices. Soups include ash reshteh, sort of a delicious Iranian version of Mediterranean pistou that is fragrant with dill and garlic, thick with beans and noodles. Cotelette are dry and uninteresting fried chickpea patties; the exotic-sounding Olivieh salad, with peas and chicken and historic Russian roots, tastes pretty much like deli potato salad.

But what sets Shahrzad apart is its daily specials, various braises and pilafs that are quite unlike anything you’ll taste outside an Iranian home. If sabzi polo happens to be offered, order it: the giant mound of green, dilled rice pilaf is topped with chunks of crusty, perfectly grilled whitefish, redolent of its herbed marinade. Tahchin is an enormous, crisp-crusted brick of saffron-yellow rice, the size of a cinder block, that is stuffed with braised lamb and garnished with bitter-sweet barberries, a native Iranian fruit. Baghali polo involves a nicely seasoned lamb shank completely buried underneath dilled, lima bean-spiked rice; zereshk polo is pretty much a yellow thing like the tahchin , but without the crust and concealing half of a dryish, plain boiled chicken. Each order is enough to feed two.

Fesenjan , the popular Iranian dish of chicken sauced with a puree of pomegranate and ground walnuts, is less sweet than usual, and of clear pomegranate flavor. Karafs , described on the menu as fried celery, is terrific, the pungence of long-braised celery tamed with lime and mint. Karafs might be my favorite dish in the restaurant.

There are the stews: gormeh sabzi , the best, with dried lime, kidney beans and spinach cooked until it collapses into a dark-green puree; badjeman , eggplant cooked in a steely tomato sauce with veal; and ghaimeh , a thick split-pea thing. (You can have any two of the stews on a slab of crunchy rice crust, called tah dig , as an appetizer. Do--it’s the biggest bargain on the menu.)

And for dessert, tea served in glasses, with wafers of homemade caramel to sweeten it and maybe a pastry alongside. Or heck, you’ve come this far. The two traditional Iranian sweets served here--rose-scented ice cream and a sort of sorbet studded with toasted vermicelli--are odd, but more than a little compelling.

Shahrzad Flame Restaurant, 1442 Westwood Blvd., Westwood, (310) 470-9131. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Takeout. No alcohol. Dinner for two, food only, $14-$30.