Getting Dizi

Pishkhan is a perfect little Cornell box of a Persian restaurant, a dozen cramped tables in a corner of eastern Glendale, a varicolored dining room alive with bird song and crooning Italian pop. If Hef’s designers had had a little more imagination 20 years ago, Pishkhan might have made a groovy bachelor-pad set for “Playboy After Dark.”

One wall is sheathed in gleaming copper, decorated at intervals with odd constructions made from fans, fins and fish tails. The front window--and the napkin dispensers--are sponged with metallic paints in a stippled effect that looks like the outside of the fanciest Kleenex boxes. Matisse might have painted an odalisque lounging on one of the restaurant’s low stools.

Vartan Keshishzadeh, the owner, a mustachioed guy who looks a little like the old Camel Filters model, stops by the table to chat. “I came six years ago to the land of opportunity,” he says, fingering his chin. “I have yet to find it.” He looks around and laughs. Vartan was an artist back in Iran, and now works inside his very own piece of installation art.

“We get all kinds of people in here,” he says. “Persians, Armenians, Arabs . . . this is America.”

Whatever you order at Pishkhan, you get a basket of warm pita bread, a plate of fresh herbs, a chunk of white cheese and an onion, also small bowls of homemade yogurt and a tart eggplant salad that has been seasoned with a little too much liquid smoke. I have always wondered what you are supposed to do with the quartered raw onions that Persian restaurants inevitably serve with the bread.

Vartan shrugs. “We eat them,” he says, “but afterward we do not kiss our girlfriends.”

There are the usual kebabs and such, broiled skewers of marinated steak, chicken or seasoned ground meat. There are big bland bowls of brains, hotly seasoned with black pepper, and the popular weekend breakfast dish that combines tongue, brains and cow’s foot. There are cubes of broiled white fish, crisp and melting, served atop giant mounds of rice. There are delicious broiled lamb shanks, richly flavored, served with a sauce made out of dried fruits.

But the main event at Pishkhan is the dizi , a paste of mashed lamb and herbs and chickpeas having the exact taupe color of a J. Crew cotton sweater and the consistency of ripe guacamole.

At the only other local restaurant I’ve ever known to offer this dish, you were given the lamb, the vegetables and a mortar and pestle, and invited to grind your own. If you didn’t happen to be Persian and didn’t happen to have tried this before, you found yourself made into a figure of fun.

At Pishkhan, the chef mashes dizi for you out in the kitchen, and what you are brought is a plate of the paste, a bowl of toasted pita chips and what looks like a stainless-steel nuclear cooling tower filled with fragrant lamb broth. You toss a couple of handfuls of the pita chips into a metal bowl, and the waitress tips the cooling tower over them, soaking the chips in the broth--the Persian answer to matzo-ball soup. Dizi is an entirely satisfying meal.

Afterward, the Italian music having segued into vintage Persian ballads, you might want to finish your meal with a cup of silky Turkish coffee or Pishkhan’s strong, perfume-y tea served in squat, Middle Eastern-style glasses.

“Say, this tea is really good,” I said once, surprised at the intensity of the taste.

Vartan looked at me, and squinted, and cocked his head. “Of course,” he said. “The tea is real.”

* Pishkhan Restaurant

1014 E. Colorado Blvd., Glendale, (818) 507-8769. Open Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Saturday, 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Sunday, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Takeout. Free delivery within Glendale area. Dinner for two, food only, $8-$14.