The Politics of Class and Culinary Consumption in Tehran

Stepping foot in the swanky café-restaurant, Capitan Lounge, you find yourself in a place of adventure and fantasy. At the entrance, the logo of a bearded sea captain, resembling the seafaring Captain Haddock from the adventures of Tintin, summons his visitors with the call of the sea. A large miniature sailboat hangs overhead. The nautical décor evokes a journey on a lavish ship. Once inside Capitan Lounge, the sails unfurl, and you embark on gastronomical waves pulling you to a faraway land.

[Image taken by Babak Rahimi.] 

Welcome to Tehran’s latest slew of luxury restaurants. Located on Pasdaran Avenue, an affluent commercial thoroughfare in a northern district of the capital, Capitan Lounge is frequented by cliques of middle-age women, solitary dandies, and curious tourists. But mostly it is a place for young couples, chatting away while smoking ghelyoon and merrily sipping a cold glass of mojito. The three-story building of hedonistic consumption can get busy, especially on a Thursday when Tehranis leave home for a night out in the city of endless traffic and noise. The pricey menu is a clear indication that not everyone can afford the trendy dishes, especially since such expensive prices hardly match the quality of the meals. The cuisine ranges from Iranian to international, but patrons at Capitan Lounge do not splurge to enjoy a tasty meal. You come to bask in the chic ambience that signifies your social status and expresses you as a consuming individual. Your very presence is an indicator of class cultivation for the future-to-come. “Taste a delicious meal on your ship,” the restaurant-café’s official slogan proclaims. At Capitan Lounge, one enters a world of personalized culinary delight alongside northern Tehran’s other glitterati.

A few kilometers drive south of Tehran will transport you to an altogether different part of the busy metropolis. Here at Maydan-e Mohammadiyeh, near the busy old bazaar and amid mostly working-class neighborhoods, a newly reconstructed Qajar-era building, a former warehouse in use until 2001, represents a different type of luxury café-restaurant.[i] Even the most critical observer cannot resist the allure and nostalgic gleam of Vakil-o-Tojjar.

[Image taken by Babak Rahimi.]

The exquisite eatery combines the spectacle of classic architecture with a sumptuous interior, decorated with a traditional water pond, a miniature art mural, a colored glass façade, and graceful chandeliers. Antique radios and gramophones embellish the interior seating arrangement of this spacious establishment, transporting the visitor to a different historical era detached from the modern tempo of everyday life. At times, Vakil-o-Tojjar appears like a time capsule with a museum-like ambition for inventing a lost past. If we are to believe one of the owners, Javad Ramezan, Vakil-o-Tojjar is a testament to a nationalistic desire to preserve the country’s heritage. Rather than erect a “commercial tower instead,"[ii] the restaurant is a moveable feast of longing for a pre-revolutionary Iran: a nostalgic site of yearning for a yesterday yet to come. 

[Image taken by Babak Rahimi.] 

On exiting Vakil-o-Tojjar, after consuming a pricey traditional meal served on a lavish dish, one has the odd sense of having watched a period piece at the cinema. Employees dressed up in 1920s (or perhaps 30s) attire resembling characters in a post-revolutionary historical drama bid you farewell. The charms of a fantasy land Qajaresque delight capture your imagination. The same cannot be said of the mediocre meal.

[Image taken by Babak Rahimi.]

One northern and chic, the other southern and traditional, the two restaurants are part of a new urban cultural trend: a growing taste for luxury. While Capitan Lounge represents an aesthetic site of modern chic, Vakil-o-Tojjar signifies an antique elegance, a nostalgic chic. Both places, however, are about upscale luxury, and, more importantly, the kind of luxury that reaffirms class distinction and social status through the consumption of peculiar goods, especially exotic and traditional meals. Though the two restaurants unequivocally map onto Tehran’s urban geography, which, in terms of both material and imaginal realities, is profoundly stratified along class lines, it is mostly the affluent that dine at these restaurants. Limits to urban mobility between “bala-ye shahr” (upper city) and “paeen-e shahr” (lower city), though inherently built into the geo-economic locality of the two restaurants, are transcended by a common claim to luxury consumption and exclusivity.

Consumption always converges with space. Like in the case of China and India, where demand for luxury goods from an emerging wealthy class have overshadowed the growth of economic disparities, the market for excess and extravagance overlaps with flourishing leisure spaces. The urban cultural trend though extends over a crowded and densely-populated capital city where numerous trendy cafés and spacious shopping malls (such as the massive Iran Mall, the world’s largest) are symptomatic of major changes in patterns of consumption characterizing a post-revolutionary society that once sought to uphold the plight of the lower classes, or the dispossessed (mostazafin).

The type of Iranians drawn to these restaurants, however, are mostly from a distinct segment of Tehran’s population. In terms of social class description, that segment requires a new analytical category, the description of which would require extensive fieldwork and analysis. For the most part, they are not the salaried middle-class nor the unemployed or educated young migrants whose residence in Tehran depends on multiple jobs or family support. In what Asef Bayat has called a “middle-class poor,” comprised of teachers, lawyers, and other professionals, this disgruntled class self-identifies as an alienated stratum of Iranian society. A growing sense of alienation encompasses a larger youth population suspended in what Shahram Khosravi describes as a “precarious life” of waiting and hoping for an alternative future.[iii]

Contrary to a popular view that has become entrenched in media and certain academic trends, the emergence of luxury spaces is not about an all-inclusive Iranian desire for a better life in the all-too heroic act of cultural resistance, simplistically described as “lipstick jihad.” Rather, such spaces reassert the cultural capital of a social class that appears to closely follow a global trend toward accelerated neoliberal restructuring. Amongst those who most frequent Tehran’s luxury restaurants are a strata of people who have seen their wealth soar in recent years and profited from the ongoing financial instabilities which exacerbated financial turmoil in currency and gold markets following the reinstatement of US sanctions in the summer of 2018, but perhaps more importantly in the real estate market, which began to boom in the mid-2000s. The new class that has benefited the most from the housing market economy with its high cashflow in rent and redevelopment appears to be leading the way in the growth of luxury restaurants; as venture rentiers, they are also its primary consumers.

The current trend for luxury sharply contradicts the economic conditions of a country undergoing major economic problems. Severely impacted by US sanctions, Iran’s economy is expected to further stagnate in the coming financial year, and the prospect of economic revival appears bleak.[iv] With inflation as high as 35.7 percent and a seriously devalued currency, the Iranian middle-class poor is growing poorer by the year.[v] So how do we explain the growing taste for luxury?

The new leisure-city landscape is deliberately designed in reaction to the waning economic conditions configured according to stratified social relations. Less about escapism than enclosure, the luxury restaurant trend carves out spaces of conspicuous consumption so as to immerse the post-revolutionary urban rentier class in a dreamworld of hedonistic excess and free time. Yet consumptive enclosure is not about exclusion. It is a public inclusivity that depends on other classes, in particular the middle-class poor, to visit, explore, and enjoy these sites but ultimately to feel their economic realities at a distance from the luxury spaces invested in and constructed by rentier capitalism. In a dramaturgical sense, after visiting a new Tehrani restaurant, a sojourning middle-class poor can perform class mobility. Culinary consumption is an embodied performance of status with the attendant access to luxury goods in specific, convivial spaces of consumption, like those found at food courts in large luxury malls such as Palladium Mall or hypermarkets such as Iran Mall. For a fleeting evening of sumptuous delight in a carefree place of luxurious consumption, where the real and fantastical seamlessly blend together resembling a theme park with hints of Iranian culture, the middle-class poor and the new rich can partake in a sense of shared prosperity from different perspectives, amid a stagnant economy based on growing social inequality. Contrary to the typical image of cafés and restaurants as liberal enclaves in the Islamic political system, mushrooming luxury restaurants are increasingly becoming theatrical sites of class distinction in thrall to what Karl Marx once called the “theological niceties” of commodity goods. The demand for new urban luxury is tied with cross-regional processes that coincide with changing world economies, especially in the Global South. Iran will most likely continue to experience these economic changes in the near future, regardless of the reach of sanctions. Food, in this global trend toward luxury, serves as a boundary-marker, but the sort that privileges adventure and specifically nostalgia for fantasies of lost yesterdays and anticipated tomorrows which all can share and experience. 

At the end of our all-too-brief culinary venture to luxurious Tehran, let us take a different culinary excursion. Just a short walk north of Maydan-e Mohammadiyeh, where most neighborhoods are populated by working-class people who frequent small diners on the main street, you find what the locals call the best kebab shop in Tehran. At Gol-e sorkh (“Red Flower”) eatery you are greeted by a cheerful working-class couple, a husband and wife chef team whose freshly cooked traditional dishes are mouthwatering.

[Image taken by Babak Rahimi.] 

With twenty-five thousand tomans (roughly two dollars) you can purchase a dish of beef and split pea stew (khoreshte gheyme), popular among the poor and the working classes, consumed during the religious festivals elaborately celebrated in southern Tehran. Eating at Gol-e sorkh you eat as you will, just like the locals, without the need to show off fashionable clothes or the latest iPhone. The only luxury you experience at Gol-e sorkh is the sensation of unending delight in feasting on delicious food amid a city all-too-quickly moving toward an unknown future.