This 36-Year-Old Market Is a Homey Destination for Iranian Food

KQED’s Silicon Valley Unseen is a series of photo essays, original reporting and underreported histories that survey the tech capital’s overlooked communities and subcultures from a local perspective.

My earliest childhood memories revolve around an apartment building near downtown Mountain View, populated by immigrant Asian families and, for a time, my Mexican dad. I vividly recall its details: tight quarters, cockroaches scattering between tiles, a shared backyard and the overpowering aroma of mixed diasporas trying to cook their way back to some faraway homeland.

The most distinct sensory detail, though — one I’ve literally dreamt of as an adult — was the daily, charcoal-thick waft from the Persian market across the street, where Middle Eastern spices commingled with joojeh kabab and koobideh.

Rose Market is where we’d go for everything from bubblegum and Tahitian punch soda to fresh veggies and poultry. It was among the few places I was allowed to walk to, on my own or with my older brother. Though we moved out of those apartments in the late ’90s, my memory of that market has endured.

Rose Market stood in that same location for decades. At the height of its popularity, Middle Eastern families would visit from all over the region. The market eventually expanded to nearby Saratoga, becoming Silicon Valley’s definitive outlet for Iranian foods and groceries.

But over the years, as Silicon Valley underwent drastic redevelopment and a tech-induced real estate land grab, some smaller businesses clustered near Rose Market — including Clarke’s Burgers, Le’s Alterations, an auto shop and a liquor store  — receded from the landscape. Clarke’s had been a no-frills neighborhood institution, and it was where my single dad would often take us to watch 49ers games. Prior to its closing in 2020, near the start of the pandemic, it had been the oldest restaurant in all of Mountain View, and perhaps the most universally beloved.

By then, Rose had also disappeared in Mountain View. From 2015 to 2019, as rents skyrocketed and trendier properties sprouted up nearby, the humble Iranian market closed its doors, making way for a ritzy mixed-use apartment complex. For nearly half a decade, there was no scent of Persian-style kebabs in Mountain View.

Due to public outcry, however, the developer signed long-term leases for a handful of small businesses, including Rose, to remain on the ground floor once construction was complete. Through all of those back-and-forth negotiations, and a temporary relocation to Cupertino, Rose Market was one of the lucky ones, able to endure.

In 2019, Rose finally reopened at the new site. Its exterior is modernized, an extension of a sterile, swanky campus-like structure, similar to those of adjacent small businesses like Le’s Alterations, the Asian-owned dry cleaner from my childhood.

Fortunately, Rose Market continues to supply a busy clientele with imported specialty products, like Persian pistachio ice cream sandwiches and an extensive selection of hard-to-find teas from abroad. Though unfamiliar in its updated appearance, it still delivers the same aromatic sensory overload of the old market, offering a soupçon of Iranian culture I’ve always associated with my South Bay upbringing.

The Bay Area — and Silicon Valley, in particular — has been a hotbed for Iranian immigrants and refugees for over half a century. The initial wave of Persians mass migrated to the United States in 1979 as a result of the Islamic Revolution, with the highest concentrations in Los Angeles and San Jose. From 1980 to 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War, even more Iranians left their homeland for California. Today, the state boasts the highest population of Iranians nationwide with over 200,000 estimated residents (as the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies reports, no official census data exists for Iranian Americans).

After leaving Iran, Saied Mehranfar cofounded Rose Market with his brothers in 1988. You can usually find him bustling around the market, delegating tasks and overseeing the business. His English is limited and his storytelling is sparse, but during a recent visit he gave me a tour around the shop, pointing out the different sections of fresh produce, imported beverages and the store’s upgraded kitchen. He then directed me to his nephew, Ramin, a second-generation Iranian American who helps run daily operations.

“The developer came and bought up all this property piece by piece, and everything closed down for a few years,” Ramin said, recalling the period of time when the market’s future in Mountain View was uncertain. “[But] this place was always meant for us to come back.”

“Mountain View had the first Rose Market,” he continued, referring to the shop’s previous iteration in another part of Mountain View. “Then [we] got a bigger place, and then the one that everybody knows from over 35 years ago.”

I was one of those who grew up knowing Rose on Castro Street and Victor Way, when smells from the market wandered through my second-floor apartment’s bedroom window. (The view to the market has since been obstructed by a cookie-cutter development of homes in the adjacent lot, once a dirt field wonderland for kids like me.) Just as Rose offers a sense of connection to a lost homeland for Iranians and Middle Eastern immigrants, it simultaneously connects me to my own upbringing in pre-Googleplex Mountain View.

Mohammad Gorjestani can relate. An Iranian born filmmaker, artist, and founder of production company and creative studio Even/Odd in San Francisco, Gorjestani grew up in West San Jose immersed in Iranian traditions. After he and his parents arrived to the Bay Area from Iran in 1988, places like Rose Market became a destination.

“It was a little far from The Gardens [a Section 8 apartment complex in San Jose where many Iranian families lived], but we would pick up food often at places like Chelokebabi, Yas, or Rose Market and picnic at Shoreline,” says Gorjestani. “That was a tradition.”

As a filmmaker who spent this past summer in Iran capturing the nation’s affinity for wrestling during the 2024 Olympics, Gorjestani is aware of the various complexities and nuances that surround Iran, its migrants and its cultural norms. While the slang and customs have morphed in Iran — a nation which Gorjestani admits is “like a black box to Americans,” due its portrayal, restricted access, and heavy Western sanctions — Iranians in the diaspora have been more stuck in a time of the past.

“Iran has evolved, but the people who immigrated here are still mimicking what they left behind, I think it’s a natural way of finding comfort for my parents’ generation especially” he told me over the phone while still overseas. “There’s a curtain drawn around Iran by the West. It’s very particular what is seen and shared. That’s why, even being there, it’s like being in a portal. You feel totally transported.”

Gorjestani reflected on his recent trip to Tehran, Iran’s metropolitan capital, and how it was filled with younger “new wave” efforts, such as craft coffee shops and eateries excited to offer pizzas and burgers. He sees the art and culinary scene in Tehran as eclectic, worldly, experimental — on par with other major cities in the world. In Northern Iran, known for its food and especially sour flavor profiles, Gorjestani experienced things he didn’t even know existed like “Chanar,” distinctly regional dessert shops focused on creating pomegranate-only concoctions of shaved ice, slushies and regional lavashak (“fruit roll-ups”) that he’s never seen. It’s not the Iran that his parents or former generations may have remembered or ever known.

There’s even a word commonly used  (“sonnati”) for anything  traditional. It’s not that traditional foods and customs are no longer revered; they’re just no longer the only defining aspects of define Iran’s burgeoning multi-generational identity. 

“When I was going out over there, people would ask, do you want to go to a sonnati — like a traditional place — or do you want to go to a contemporary place, like a fast food spot? I got asked that a lot by all the gracious hosts I had” he says.

For Gorjestani, Rose Market is more sonnati. It’s a reflection of a time left behind by a certain generation.

“These Iranian markets [in Silicon Valley] were new at the time,” says Gorjestani. “These places were [being opened by] immigrants in their twenties, thirties, maybe forties and fifties if you’re pushing it. They had this energy to create something for the diaspora here and for themselves to deal with being homesick. Then they get older, their businesses get older, and maybe their kids don’t want to run a family business or do their own thing. They’re not as connected to the homeland as their parents are, and things start to fade, assimilate, move on. It’s natural for the ebb and flow of any diaspora. But I’m so grateful for places like Rose Market who kept us connected to our Vatan [motherland]. ”

Dinner at Rose Market might begin with fesenjan, a sweet pomegranate stew bathing thick, uneven chunks of chicken and mixed with ground walnut. When scooped on top of an order of cabbage rice, it smacks harder than just about any dish I’ve ever had. You can pair that with koofteh Tabrizi, a delectable meatball bigger — and meatier — than my balled up fist. The saffron and cinnamon mingle with fresh herbs, onions and prunes, while a massive walnut stuffed at its core awaits. Unlike the average American meatball, which usually functions as a sidekick to pasta, the Iranian koofteh is a meal unto itself. Served in its own juices, it needn’t be accompanied by much more than your appetite.

But you’ll want to add more anyway: ghormeh sabzi (a zesty, lemony stew of kidney beans and tender beef), kalam polo (rice and cabbage fried to a golden, auburn hue), tabouli salad, tahdig (crisp, pan-burnt rice), and the showstopping varieties of kebab plated in a to-go box with a generous side of traditional Persian lavash.

These items won’t just fill an empty stomach. They’ll bring you closer to enlightenment, reminding you of all things good and holy about our corporeal existence. In that sense, Rose Market is about timelessness, and perhaps that’s why it has lasted for nearly 40 years.

In Silicon Valley — hyper-forward thinking, constantly transmorphing — sonnati is necessary. Rose Market may be stuck on a different Iranian timeline, but it represents a more tender version of Silicon Valley, before the dot-com arms race seized this region’s image, and dictated who gets to live and eat here.

When I walk into Rose Market now — as an adult, father, and journalist — it teleports me to a quondam time and place that I can never let go of. These days, that’s the kind of nourishment I rarely get anywhere else.