By Anne Gelhaus
For eight years, owner Majid Jalali has served hamburgers and falafels at Laleh's Burger & Grill, but it wasn't until last month that he realized his goal to put Persian food on the menu.
"I always planned on it," Jalali says, "but I didn't have a chef. Then my old friend Behrooz Askarian moved from Germany, where he was in the business for 17 years."
With Askarian on board to prepare the food, Jalali created a separate menu of Persian dishes. The appetizers include Kashk-e-Budemejan (eggplant in a yogurt-based sauce served with the flat bread lavosh) and salad Shirazy (tomato, onion and cucumber mixed with lemon juice and Persian herbs).
For entrées, Jalali decided to focus exclusively on kabobs.
"There's a huge variety of Persian food," he explains. "I had to narrow it down to make it manageable."
Be they lamb, chicken, ground beef or filet mignon, all kabobs are served on a bed of long-grain basmati rice. The meat is often marinated in sauces that have lemon juice, olive oil, saffron and Persian spices as their base. Jalali says Persian spices tend to be sweet and temper the tang of the lemon juice.
Jalali says his regular customers have been willing to forego their accustomed burgers to try a kabob.
"They'll order a Koobideh [ground beef skewer] and say they've tried one before," he adds. "I didn't know that they even knew what it was. I wanted to surprise people, but they're surprising me."
Although he still serves his original bill of fare in addition to the Persian dishes, Laleh's new menu offers Jalali a welcome change from eight years of flipping burgers and making deli sandwiches.
"I finally told myself, 'Enough with the Philly cheesesteaks. Let's go to Persian food,' " he says.
Laleh's Burger & Grill, 551 N. Santa Cruz Ave., Los Gatos. 354-4545. Hours: 11 a.m.-9 p.m. daily.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, January 17, 1996.
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