What is Persian Room?
Persian Room is the restaurant that has anchored the corner of 17040 N Scottsdale Road and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard since December 2001, when owner Nasser Nikkhahmanesh moved his small Scottsdale restaurant, Wine & Kebab, into what Phoenix New Times called “expansive new digs.” It is the longest-running Persian restaurant in the city, the most reviewed by a wide margin, and the one that North Scottsdale and Paradise Valley families use for birthdays, Nowruz and the dinner after a Mayo Clinic appointment.
Nikkhahmanesh came to the Valley’s restaurant trade early. Phoenix Magazine says his Shish Kebab House in Glendale opened in 1985 as the Valley’s first Persian restaurant; the restaurant’s own listings push his West Valley start back to 1977. Either way, by the time New Times’ Carey Sweet reviewed the new room in February 2002, the paper could say he had been in business “almost three decades” and “knows his market.” Wine & Kebab had been good and cramped. The new building at the busiest corner in North Scottsdale was neither.
The room is the reason the restaurant kept its name. Two stories joined by a staircase, columns with gilt accents, chandeliers and heavy drapery, what the restaurant calls “an atmosphere of plush elegance” and a AAA inspector called “a remarkable setting.” The menu is the classical Persian repertoire: clay-oven bread, charcoal-grilled kebabs of filet, ground beef, chicken and lamb, mounds of saffron basmati rice, and the stews, ghormeh sabzi, fessenjan and gheimeh bademjan, that give the cuisine its depth. The restaurant describes it as flavorful but not spicy, and the Zabihah directory lists it as halal.
A second Persian Room opened in Tucson on June 15, 2018, co-owned with Nikkhahmanesh’s sister Farideh, with the same menu. Our verdict: the cooking is consistent rather than adventurous, the portions are large, the room is a genuine occasion, and after a quarter century at the corner it is one of the few North Scottsdale restaurants that feels like it belongs to the neighborhood rather than to a group.
Ordering at Persian Room
Order a kebab platter. The dinner menu posted on the website prices barg, a 12-ounce skewer of marinated filet mignon, at $34.95; beef shish kebab at $33.95; koobideh, the seasoned ground beef or chicken skewer that New Times praised for its onion-tasting marinade, in the mid-$20s; sultani, barg plus koobideh, at $38.95; naderi, filet and chicken on one skewer, at $32.95, or naderi sultani at $36.95; and lamb shish kebab at $35.95. Platters come with saffron rice and a grilled tomato, and the bread arrives from the clay oven. The Persian Room special platter is $44.95 and the chicken filet sultani $30.95.
Or go braised. Lamb shanks over baghala polo, rice with dill and fava beans, are $36.95; the lamb loin over adas polo, rice with lentils, dates and raisins, is the same price; and there is a marinated rack of lamb with the fava rice and a Cornish hen. The stews are the home cooking: ghormeh sabzi with herbs, kidney beans and dried lime; fessenjan, chicken in pomegranate and walnut; vegetarian gheimeh bademjan with eggplant and split peas; and zereshk polo, chicken with barberries and saffron rice, which Sweet singled out in 2002. Tah dig, the crisp rice crust served under a stew, is subject to availability and worth asking for first.
Start and finish. The appetizer platter covers the spread: kashk-o-bademjan (roasted eggplant with whey, garlic and mint), hummus, torshi pickles, and osh reshteh, the herb and noodle soup. Appetizers run roughly $11 to $16. Dessert is zoolbia bamieh, fried pastry in rosewater and saffron syrup, with tea.
Timing. Hours are 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 10:30 Friday and Saturday, and there is a separate lunch menu. Weekday lunch is quiet and cheaper. Friday and Saturday nights fill both floors, and the two weeks around Nowruz in late March, when the Persian New Year festival brings the Valley’s Iranian community together, are the busiest of the year. OpenTable shows about 2,800 reviews at 4.7 stars; Yelp has roughly 1,700.
Getting there. The restaurant sits at the northeast quadrant of Scottsdale Road and Frank Lloyd Wright, a block south of the Loop 101 interchange, with its own lot; enter from Frank Lloyd Wright rather than turning across Scottsdale Road at dinner hour. It is ten minutes from Kierland, the Princess and Mayo. Dress is up a notch from the strip centers around it, which is the room’s doing rather than any rule.
Thirty years of kebabs on Scottsdale Road
Persian food reached the Valley through Glendale. Phoenix Magazine’s 2013 re-review tells the story from a diner’s side: a reader whose “tah dig-filled dreams were finally answered” at Shish Kebab House, which the magazine dates to 1985 and calls the Valley’s first Persian restaurant, and who, “in 2001, when owner Nasser Nikkhahmanesh packed up and opened the Persian Room in Scottsdale,” followed him across town. That is the arc of a lot of Valley restaurants in the 2000s: a West Valley original, a Scottsdale move, a bigger room, a richer clientele.
The middle step was Wine & Kebab, the small Scottsdale restaurant that New Times said “proved too small.” Its space went to Peter’s Budapest Café. In December 2001 Nikkhahmanesh relocated to Frank Lloyd Wright and Scottsdale Road, and on February 28, 2002, Carey Sweet’s review ran under the headline “Gheimeh Shelter.” She found a chicken kebab “bathed in a good, onion-tasting marinade,” a lamb shish kebab broiled with peppers and onions, and a zereshk polo lifted by tart barberries and saffron, and she gave the owner credit for knowing exactly whom he was cooking for.
He was cooking for a North Scottsdale that was filling in around him. The Frank Lloyd Wright corner in 2001 was new construction at the edge of the city’s growth, with the 101 freshly open and Kierland and the Princess drawing a resort crowd north. Persian Room’s two-story, gilt-column room was built for that market: a special-occasion restaurant for a neighborhood of new houses, with food that was unfamiliar to most of its guests and never aggressive. The strategy held. A AAA inspector’s note, “trendy food skillfully presented in a remarkable setting,” is the kind of praise the room has drawn for two decades, and the restaurant’s own site now claims more than 30 years of serving Persian food in the Valley, counting its predecessors.
In 2018 the family expanded to Tucson, where Nikkhahmanesh and his sister Farideh opened a Persian Room on North Thornydale Road with the same menu; he told Tucson Foodie the new room was “more upscale and welcoming” than the original. What the record does not say is almost anything about the Scottsdale kitchen: who cooks day to day, how the menu has changed beyond prices, or when exactly Shish Kebab House opened, since the restaurant’s listings and the magazine disagree by eight years. Local critics have not re-reviewed it since 2013; the review record since then is the thousands of diner reviews on OpenTable and Yelp.
Honest assessment: Persian Room is a reliable, generous, slightly formal restaurant that has not changed much because it has not needed to. The kebabs are the strength, the stews are the reason to return, the prices have climbed into steakhouse territory for the lamb, and the room still does what it was built to do. In a stretch of Scottsdale Road where restaurants turn over with each lease, 25 years at one corner is its own argument. Among the city’s Mediterranean rooms it is the one with a real history, and the one to book for Nowruz.