Yesterday, I hired a car and driver, specifically, to take me to the restaurant in Darakeh that Mahsan recommended. Before I left, two other people from our tour group turned up – Dave and Zoe from San Francisco – and asked if they could join me. (Yay! Company!) We invited Adi, our driver, to join us for lunch as well.

Check out the snow-capped mountains.

Darakeh and Darband are located at the foothills of the Alborz Mountains in north Tehran, about an hour’s drive from the city center. They are popular weekend hangouts for those who want to get out and enjoy nature. There are supposed to be several hiking trails that go past waterfalls and cross streams…

I just went there to eat.

Remember that the recommendation came from conservatively dressed Mahsan. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but it certainly wasn’t the fancy restaurant we found, where Tehran’s elite seem to congregate. (The city center, where I am staying, is the ghetto which, ironically, is near the museums and embassies. The north is where the affluent live.)

I asked Adi to order the shishlik for me. He looked at the price and objected. “That’s too much.” When I found out that shishlik was shish kebab, I started to doubt. Maybe the place was just an overpriced kebab joint. I went over my notes. I settled for the baghali polo instead.

“What’s that,” Zoe asked.

“I have no idea,” I said.

Actually, I did. Akram recommended it and Asghar described it as “beans and rice and meat”. Hardly appetizing. But I wanted to trust my new friends’ recommendation and Zoe ordered the shishlik anyway, so I was sure to get to try it too.

Mirza ghasemi was listed as an appetizer so I definitely had to order that. Adi said he hated it. I ordered it anyway. I promised Aida, and it was one more thing to check off my list.

To drink, we ordered a pitcher of dugh , watered-down yogurt, much like a salty lassi.

The mirza ghasemi turned out to be similar to baba ganoush. Good, but even better with a dollop of the thick yogurt the dugh came with.

And then our food arrived.

My baghali polo was a mound of herbed rice (- the beans were broad beans which blended nicely with the rice) and INSIDE the rice were chunks of flavorful lamb. I can’t rave about it enough. Zoe liked it so much that she ordered it for dinner at another restaurant that night, where it was served the traditional way, with the rice – still a large mound, but separate from the lamb shank, served still on the bone. Both versions were delicious but I think the one at SPU Restaurant wins hands down.

Shishlik, apparently, is the shish kebab to end all shish kebabs. Think lamb CHOPS, grilled kebab-style and then unskewered. It was perfect. Tender and amazingly succulent. Strangely, Zoe ate only one piece and concentrated more on finishing off her rice.

The dishes were so big that I only got through about half of mine. But then, I did have one of Zoe’s lamb chops and a taste of Dave’s fish and Adi’s chicken kebab.

From the top, left to right, Dave’s rice that came with his fried fish; the mirza ghasemi that we plowed through, Adi’s rice which is in front of the kebab plate which has his chicken kebab and Zoe’s lamb kebab; and the dugh. On the bottom, from left to right, Zoe’s rice – with the yogurt that came with the dugh in front of it, some bread, and my wonderful, mouth-watering baghali polo.

Our total bill came out to 1,250,000 rials (US$73.50 or P3162). Definitely pricey by Iranian standards. (Our dinner at a restaurant near our hotel that night cost about a third of that, also for four people.)

But a visit to SPU Restaurant is a must for anyone visiting Tehran. Keep in mind though that none of the staff speak English, and that servings of shishlik and baghali polo are good for two to three persons.

It’s a great place to people watch too.

Taking pictures over Adi’s shoulder of one of Tehran’s modern women.

After lunch, we went to Niyavaran Palace Museum, where the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, lived with his family. It’s a five hectare complex with four separate museums. Apart from an entrance fee, you also have to buy tickets for each museum. We only bought tickets to three museums (for a total of 55000 rials or US$3 or P139 for the three of us) because they ran out of tickets for the fourth – although a very nice guard let us into the museum anyway. Adi told us that, shortly after we purchased our tickets, the Museum ran out of ALL tickets and refused to let people in, angering weekenders who wanted to see displays of the Shah’s lavish lifestyle.

Several things that stood out, for me, were the Warhol painting of Mick Jagger, the dentist chair off the Hall of Mirrors and the funky 70s children’s rooms with Disney characters in the bathroom and a tent ceiling for the boy’s room and European-style pink furnishing for the girl’s room.

It’s a full-on dentist’s clinic.

Afterwards, we took a stroll in the park behind the Palace, where young girls were playing badminton and men played ping pong. Two old ladies sitting on a park bench offered us the best pistachios I’ve ever tasted.

Car, driver, lunch for four, and museum tickets for three came out to 1,825,000 rials or US$107.35 or P4,616.

*The hotel reneged on its previous offer of 15,000 rials to the dollar and offered the same crappy government rate as the airport instead. So we took our chances on the street and managed to get 17,000 rials to the dollar. (More on this later.) The computations above are based on this rate of exchange.