What is Pars Persian Cuisine?
Pars Persian Cuisine is a family-owned Persian restaurant at 11144 N Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, in a strip plaza on the west side of Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard just south of Via Linda, where the Scottsdale Ranch neighborhoods meet the medical corridor around the Mayo Clinic. Chef and owner Masoud Eghbalyan opened it in August 2006; the Better Business Bureau records his limited liability company from August 11 of that year, and the restaurant has been in the same room for twenty years.
Pars is Persian cooking by the book, which is the compliment. The charbroiler turns out koobideh of seasoned ground beef ($25), barg of charbroiled filet mignon ($33) and the Sultani that puts one of each on the plate ($37), plus lamb shish kabob and lamb barg ($30), chicken in half a dozen forms from $25 to $34, a 24-ounce Cornish hen kabob ($28), salmon over herb rice ($29) and, for vegetarians, an oyster mushroom kabob over lentil rice ($26). The stews are the heart of the menu: ghormeh sabzi of parsley, cilantro, chives, beef and kidney beans with dried limes ($24), gheimeh of beef and split peas under a thatch of fries ($24), and fessenjan, chicken in walnut and pomegranate sauce ($27). Everything comes over saffron basmati, which Phoenix New Times once called the fluffiest rice in town, and the crisp tah dig from the bottom of the pot is sold on its own, under one stew or two, as an appetizer ($22 to $23).
The room is small and, in New Times’ word, elegant: comfortable decor, doting service, lavish plating. It books solid on Valentine’s Day, as the paper discovered in 2015 when its writer had to eat dessert at the bar instead of dinner at a table. The website runs a photograph of Senator John McCain at one of those tables under the heading “Senator McCain Loves Our Food,” which tells you the clientele: the Ranch, the Mayo and HonorHealth staff, and the Iranian-American families of east Scottsdale.
It is open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day, no late nights. Our verdict: the better of Scottsdale’s two Persian dining rooms for food, the smaller and quieter of the two by design, and the best reason to drive to a strip plaza on Frank Lloyd Wright at lunch.
Ordering at Pars Persian Cuisine
Start with the tah dig. The crisp saffron rice from the bottom of the pot is the dish Persian cooks fight over at home and the one most restaurants do not bother to sell. Pars offers it under ghormeh sabzi or gheimeh ($22), under both ($23), or under both plus fessenjan ($35), which is a tasting of the three stews on one plate and the right order for a first visit. The Pars appetizer platter ($22) is the alternative: shirazi salad, maust’ khiar yogurt with cucumber and mint, hummus, Persian pickles, olivieh potato salad and dolmeh. Kashk-e-bademjan, eggplant with whey, mint and walnuts ($11), and the noodle-and-bean soup ash reshteh ($12) are the dishes for people who already know the cuisine.
Then a kabob or a stew. The Sultani ($37) is the plate to order if you order one thing: a skewer of filet barg and a skewer of koobideh over saffron basmati. The lamb shanks ($30), slow-stewed and served over dill and lima bean rice, are the comfort dish; the Cornish kabob ($28) is the one nobody else in town does. Among the stews, fessenjan ($27) is sweet-sour and rich, ghormeh sabzi ($24) is herbal and bitter from the dried limes, and the reviewers who like Pars best tend to be the ones who ordered a stew. The four combination platters at $60 feed two or three; the Pars Special is filet, Cornish hen and koobideh. Side rices run $7 for saffron basmati to $16 for the shirin polo with orange peel, carrot, pistachio and almond. A grilled tomato is $1.
Dessert and drinks. New Times’ 2015 column was emphatic: the house-made Persian ice cream ($12), saffron-yellow with buttery bits of pistachio, was hands down the best thing it ate, with the crisp syrup-soaked zoolbia ahead of the doughier bamieh ($5 for the pair) and a Turkish coffee that needed no sugar. The baklava ($8) is made with pistachio and almond rather than walnut. There is a short wine list with a pomegranate wine, three draft beers, the yogurt drink doogh with mint, and the house tea.
Timing and reservations. Hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily by the restaurant’s own site (some listings say 9). Lunch is the easy seating; dinner on Friday and Saturday and any holiday fills, and reservations are by phone at (480) 551-3222. The restaurant caters, sells gift certificates and adds no MSG, by its own account. Children’s plates of koobideh, gyros or chicken filet are $14 to $15.
Getting there. Pars is in a strip plaza on the west side of Frank Lloyd Wright just south of Via Linda; some listings give Suite E10. Park in the plaza lot. It is ten minutes from the 101 at Shea, five from the Mayo campus, and the closest serious dinner to the Ancala side of the Ranch.
Scottsdale’s other Persian room
Scottsdale has had exactly two full-dress Persian restaurants in this century, and they could not be more different in posture. The Persian Room, opened in 2001 on Scottsdale Road in the north, is a two-story production with a clay oven and a reservations book. Pars, five years younger, is a strip-plaza dining room on the east side that seats a fraction of the number and has never tried to be anything else. A third-party listing claims Pars was founded by a former owner of the Persian Room; nothing in the record we found supports that, and the BBB and the restaurant’s own site name only Eghbalyan, so we treat it as a rumor.
The location explains the restaurant. Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard south of Via Linda is the seam between Scottsdale Ranch, the 1980s lake subdivision whose plazas hide several of the city’s best neighborhood kitchens, and the hospital corridor of Shea Boulevard, with the Mayo Clinic and HonorHealth Shea a few minutes away. That is a lunch crowd of physicians and a dinner crowd of families, and Pars opened in 2006, at the top of the 2000s boom, to serve exactly them. The McCain photograph fits: the restaurant’s pride in the visit says something about how a small immigrant-family dining room sees itself in a city of resorts.
The press has been steady rather than loud. New Times’ location page praises lavish, beautifully presented dishes and doting service; its roundup of ten great Middle Eastern restaurants in metro Phoenix put Pars among them as the fancier option, with vegan and vegetarian dishes sharing top billing; and the 2015 Dessert First column, which found the room booked solid on Valentine’s Day, remains the most detailed account of the kitchen in print. Diners on the review sites split the way they do at every Persian restaurant in America, between people who find the portions generous and the rice perfect and people who find $25 kabobs expensive for a strip mall. Gluten-free diners are the restaurant’s most loyal online constituency, because almost nothing on a Persian menu contains wheat and Pars marks the few things that do.
What the record does not say is almost anything about Eghbalyan himself: where he cooked before 2006, whether the family that runs the front of the house is his, or whether the restaurant has changed hands. The hours on the restaurant’s site and on the review sites disagree by an hour at close; we have used the restaurant’s own.
Honest assessment: Pars is the Persian restaurant we would send a visitor to for the food and the Persian Room for the occasion. The kabobs are correctly charred and the rice is as good as New Times said, the stews are the real reason to come, and the dessert column was right about the ice cream. It is small, it closes at 8, it is in a plaza you will drive past once, and at $25 to $37 a plate it is priced like a Scottsdale restaurant because it is one. Twenty years in a single room on the east side, with the same owner, is its own recommendation.