Ex-Spago Pastry Chef Built a Wilshire Bakery Around the Bread She Missed

Sahar Shomali's Kouzeh in Miracle Mile bakes 25 breads tied to Iran's provinces, starting with the Tehran-style barbari.

Every morning, Sahar Shomali's father walked to the barbari bakery before breakfast and came back with two flatbreads, still hot, she told LAist. Among Iranians, she said, it's understood the bread never gets home in one piece. Somebody always grabs a hunk on the way.

That bread is why Kouzeh exists. Shomali's Iranian bakery opened earlier this year in Miracle Mile, and in Friday's Weekend Eats column for L.A. TACO, Hadley Tomicki wrote that walking in made him think about moving just to be a daily customer. LAist ran through its own standouts back in June. Reading down that list, I get it.

She got there the long way. Before Kouzeh, L.A. TACO reported, Shomali ran pastry as executive pastry chef for Suzanne Goin's Lucques restaurant group, worked beside Sherry Yard as the pastry sous chef at Spago and made desserts at April Bloomfield's The Hearth and Hound. She told LAist that was on purpose. The barbari at L.A.'s Persian bakeries wasn't the real thing to her, so she went to culinary school and worked any French or California kitchen that would hire her, steering away from Iranian food "so that I could just learn everything that I didn't know."

She quit pastry kitchens for good in 2018 to put all of it into barbari, LAist reported. She worked out the 25 breads LAist counted in June from reading, from what friends remembered of them and from one bread book a cousin sent over from Iran, Shomali told LAist.

Start where she did. L.A. TACO describes the barbari as seeded and baked on hot stone. From there, every bread in the case carries a label naming the city or province it comes from. LAist pointed to kelaneh, a Kurdish flatbread stuffed with scallion, parsley and cilantro that its writer put "somewhere between a flour tortilla and a scallion pancake."

The shelves get the same treatment. They hold jams, torshi and baked goods from Iranian women food makers around California, and Shomali told LAist she phoned each one herself to fill the space. The bakery's site lists hours of 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday. It's closed Monday and Tuesday.

Kouzeh is Farsi for a clay jar, and small ones line the case customers see first when they come in, LAist reported. Over it hangs a little drawing with an Iranian saying: "What comes out of the vessel is whatever's inside it." Shomali said she never meant for the name and the saying to line up. She picked the word because she liked its sound.

Source: lataco.com, retrieved October 30, 2026. Other sources: LAist, Kouzeh's own website.