Restaurant: Darya
Location: 12130 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90025. (310) 442-9000
Date: November 16, 2015
Cuisine: Persian
Rating: Overdone decor, solid food
LA has a tremendous Persian population, and with it a great collection of Persian restaurants.
Darya is located on Santa Monica Blvd, just across the street from Echigo.
The interior is pure Persian — circa 1980 something. Check out all that faux gilding. The columns are like painted foam. And what’s with the whacky Salvador Dali painting — although I kinda like it.
Bread in Persian restaurants comes with butter, raw onion, and radish.
It’s the super flat bread too, which means you can eat more of it.
Kashkeh Bademjan. Sauteed eggplants blended with yogurt, topped with caramelized onions, fried garlic, mint oil, and creamy kashk (whey) sauce.
Good stuff with the bread. Not only does this have a nice roasted eggplant flavor, but all those exotic additives really take it to the next level.
Beef Koobideh. Seasoned ground beef served with Adas Polo, steamed white rice mixed with lentils, raisins, and dates.
Fesenjon. Slow-boiled chicken topped with a ground walnut-pomegranate stew, served with a side of Zereshk Polo, steamed white rice mixed with barberries.
The stew is sort of halfway to a curry, a slurry of pomegranate and walnut. It’s delicious over rice. It’s spiced without being even slightly spicy, which is typical of Persian cuisine.
You can really see how Persian food stands midway in the continuum between Levantine food like Lebanese and Pakistani or Afghan.
The last time I was here before this was perhaps in 2004, and this was just a quick visit, but I’ll have to come back and sample the a wider selection of the menu. I like how you can sub out the regular rice for these more interesting rice combos too.
Title: 
Because TFA is a film, like the original three, that focuses on character, action, and individual agency. The giant political maneuvers and senate meeting mumbo-jumbo of the prequels are blessedly absent. So to is Lucas’ later vision of the galaxy as filled with teeming cities and gleaming ships. We return instead to the new high budget version of his grungy low budget first trilogy imaginings.
Back to a dessert world (not Tatooine, but close enough), with a young person in linen, a droid with plans, a villain in a black mask, invading storm troopers, and a rebel base in peril. I could fill a whole article with all the elements repeated from the original Star Wars. But while that film holds tightly to the structure 
Han Solo is, of course, the best returning character. And Chewbacca too. He’s as funny as always.
And the film is gorgeous to look at and gorgeously shot. In replicating the lower-tech style of the original trilogy with a hefty mix of practical and CGI it comes off looking far more seamless than the all CGI style of the prequels. Again, those ruined Star Destroyers come to mind. There is a slight new emphasis on “larger” creatures and creature/machine hybrids. It sounded great of course, my showing was in Dolby Atmos. I was not a fan of the Dolby 3D glasses. They made everything even dimmer than normal and almost gave me a headache. The 3D itself was fine.
