Santa Monica Boulevard runs wide and fast past Century City, and the Westfield shopping centre sits beside it like a small, well-kept town with its upper level open to the sky. Los Angeles is hardly short of Persian restaurants, least of all a mile or so west along Westwood Boulevard, so it takes a certain nerve to bring one in from Atlanta. Rumi's Kitchen has done it anyway, opening on the centre's second level on 23 September 2026, and the nerve is not entirely misplaced. Its chef began cooking in this city.
Ali Mesghali brings Atlanta west
Ali Mesghali's love of cooking began while he was growing up between Esfahan, in Iran, and Los Angeles, where he first cooked in Persian restaurants. It became a career only after he moved to Atlanta. Rumi's Kitchen opened there in 2006, and Mesghali built a reputation, by the restaurant's own account, for intensity and a pursuit of perfection. The group has since spread across greater Atlanta, with rooms in Sandy Springs, Colony Square and Avalon, and on to Houston and Washington. Century City is its West Coast debut, and for its chef something of a homecoming.
“Kabobs over charcoal, stews over tahdig, and a rooftop of pomegranate trees: Atlanta's Persian standard-bearer comes west.”
A fountain, a staircase and Venetian plaster
Arrival is the showpiece. A long, porcelain-tiled entry leads past a Persian water fountain of traditional design set into the floor and wrapped in a custom mural by Dean Barger Studios. It leads to a winding staircase that looks down over great barrel-vaulted ceilings finished in Venetian plaster, with the kitchen at the back half-hidden behind an installation of antiqued mirror. Outside, the private rooftop is laid out as a Persian garden, planted with satsuma orange and pomegranate trees. Private rooms, indoors and out, handle the celebrations.
Charcoal, koobideh and kashk
The kitchen is built around live fire, charcoal included. The opening section of the menu runs from kibbeh nayyeh, a lamb and bulgur tartare, to kashk badenjoon of fried aubergine, smoky mirza ghasemi and a lamb lahmacun. The kabobs are the backbone: koobideh, soltani, and a wagyu zabuton shish kabob with urfa chilli and crispy potato tahdig. A section called Coals offers dishes for the table, among them a three-bone short rib with pomegranate glaze, and there is a lamb neck shawarma.
The stews are where the cooking turns domestic in the best sense: ghormeh sabzi, gheymeh, duck fesenjoon braised in pomegranate and walnut, and a braised lamb shank. The crust of the rice, the tahdig, is never far away.
The bar takes Persian ingredients into classic forms. Forbidden Fruit brings in lavashak, the sour fruit leather; Shah-Toot pairs raicilla with a mulberry aperitif and a lime-labneh foam; Lying in the Sun works Irani chai and whey into the glass. Doogh and house-made sodas are on hand for anyone not drinking. The wine list includes a rare run of Middle Eastern bottles going back to the 1960s, and one cocktail is called Poor Translation, which is a decent joke for a restaurant named after a poet who has been through a great many English versions.
It is a big, theatrical room in a shopping centre, with a serious Persian kitchen behind it, and in a city that knows its Persian food the kitchen is the real test. The depth of the menu suggests Mesghali knows it. Picture the rooftop garden at dusk, the pomegranate trees dark against the sky and the traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard turning to a ribbon of headlights below.
