There are a lot of nice restaurants in Tehran and every time we go we try and visit some of them. This time we visited the best ones of them all! Two of the best restaurants are SPU Restaurant and Khayyam Restaurant in the Sa’dabad Palace, Prince chubby’s old stomping ground!
The SPU restaurant was a nice restaurant with lines and reservations and all and it was kind of business like and you could see business people there as well as couples cuddling! You can read a little more about it and some photos here in this link.
I liked Khayyam restaurant the best. It is actually inside the Sa’dabad Palace and they play live music, both traditional and “classic” pop music from the 70s, in the outdoors. At least the night we were there the weather was nice and they played outside but they also have indoor areas. Prince chubby must have had good outdoor birthday parties and now it was our turn but he was there in spirits!
The restaurant is inside the complex and they took patrons by shuttle buses. The food is pretty good too and they have buffet style salad bar and you order your food. There is a $15 cover charge too which will be waived if you order food. Overall the price ended up being something like $21/person not bad considering we spent the whole night there. Some people were arriving at 10:30 or 11 at night.
The picture in this blog is when they were performing live. They’d also play some music from Dariush and Googoosh. When they were playing Dariush’s yavar hamishe moemen I was going to get some video but a waiter told me to not take videos only pictures so I stopped. Dariush and Googoosh are neither IRI friendly so … 😉
They also played some dance music and when we asked them if we could dance they said no (in the microphone) because we’d like to keep this place open to which all the audience laughed! But they’d accept some tips in their tip box! Later everyone was dancing in their seats! One bite kabob, shoulders shaking, one sip of doogh or Delester, few head turns! It was a fun night!
There is a lot of what they refer to as “traditional restaurants” in larger Tehran which are basically restaurants with live traditional music. They are good and I’ve only been to two but this one was pretty good, nice area, nice weather outdoors, a stream running through, nice stage (except as you can see in the picture they need to put the wires away 😉 and you could either sit on beds with rugs or tables with chairs. The one really bad thing about it was the bathrooms, just awful, almost forgot all the fun when I had to use them!
You can also use this link of good restaurants from Symah Sayyeh who has reported from Iran before and the nice eateries there.
