Tah Dig It, Man

The biggest concentration of Iranian-American businesses in Los Angeles is still, of course, that Westwood Boulevard commercial strip just south of the movie theaters and office buildings, a mile of video stores and groceries, places where you can have your sofa reupholstered, have jewelry appraised or buy odd candies made with rosewater and freshly roasted pistachio nuts, all, if you like, without speaking anything but Farsi.

Also along the strip are a number of sleek Iranian restaurants, all elegantly decorated, all serving more or less the same shish kebab-heavy menu--and most of them have pretty good food. Shekarchi, next door to Rhino Records, is one of the best, a modern place with recessed spotlights and accents of elegantly corroded metal. It sort of looks as if it came out of a textbook of late-’80s postmodern restaurant design, right down to the open kitchen, oblique angles and obscurely placed panes of glass. Soft-hits radio drips out of overhead speakers. Sharezad Flame up the street may still be my favorite place for broiled whitefish and hot tanuri bread, but Shekarchi does have a following.

“When we hear that Shekarchi is catering a reception,” an Iranian-wedding musician said to a friend of mine, “we try not to eat for a day before. You save more room that way.”

The main thing at Shekarchi, as at most Iranian restaurants, is long-grained rice, vast amounts of rice, lofty drifts of rice that stretch the length of the platters, frosted with a yellow scattering of more rice that has been tossed with egg yolk and an almost medicinal tincture of saffron. (The best appetizer here is tah dig , the crunchy crust from the bottom of the rice pot--smeared with a tomato-based split-pea stew and a sort of spinach-lima bean stew called ghormeh sabzi --that is as hard to stop eating as guacamole and chips.)

At one corner of the rice mountain stands a broiled tomato, blackened, oozing sweet juice; along the northern flank lies a half-pound or so of broiled meat: rather over-marinated chunks of beef filet, good lamb, the garlicky ground-beef sausages called kubideh , and crusty, blackened chicken either on the bone (better) or not. You will probably want to season the meat with lemon, but nothing cuts through the richness like a side dish of torshi, more or less a vegetable relish pickled in a violently pungent vinegar brine.

There are different kinds of pilaf ( polo ) here: a dullish sort flecked with dill and lima beans, generally served with slabs of overcooked fish; also one topped with sour cherries, another garnished with a delicious, penetratingly sweet toss of candied orange peel, pistachios and slivered almonds, which goes nicely with the grilled chicken. The ubiquitous zereshk polo , translated on Shekarchi’s menu as “Berry Berry rice,” is tossed with sauteed barberries, which have the kind of bittersweet tartness you may associate with cranberries, but far more depth of flavor.

If you have not been trained to appreciate the, er, special flavor of rosewater, Iranian desserts--rosewater-flavored pistachio ice cream, rosewater-flavored tangles of fried dough, a kind of rosewater ice shot through with toasted noodles--may be something of a disappointment.

* Shekarchi

1712 Westwood Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 474-6911. Open Sunday-Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. All major credit cards accepted. No alcohol. Street parking. Takeout and delivery. Dinner for two, food only, $13-$25.