At Kosher Persian Bakery, Baker Continues Family Tradition

Inside the Tabrizi Bakery in Water-town, owner and baker Mohammad Tahmili presides behind glass cases filled with Persian pastries.

The only sound in the bakery is soft Persian music as Tahmili nimbly squeezes dollops of dough onto a greased cookie sheet.

Pinching poppyseeds from a small bowl, he sprinkles even amounts on the rows of cookies, hands the completed cookie sheet to his assistant, Flor Castellanos, and immediately starts on another sheet.

Within minutes, the flour rice cookies are baking in the huge ovens in the back of the store, and the smell of baking cookies wrafts to the front of the small store.

"You have to love this business," Tahmili says, his white apron spotless despite the oil and flour around him. "You have to love when you bake. When everything goes right, it makes me so happy."

After seven years of working seven days a week in his kosher Persian bakery, Tahmili has acquired a fluid, methodical air.

Raised in a baking family, the 38-year-old has continued his father's tradition of making Persian delicacies on the premises.

Now, he makes approximately 15,000 pounds of kosher baked goods each year for transport to Manhattan, Queens and Long Island.

But the road to Tabrizi was hardly as smooth as Tahmili's dexterity with the cookie dough would suggest.

"It's not routine. You cannot depend on what's going to happen," Tahmili says. "I have to know this business. I practice, I learn."

A Family Tradition

Mohammad Tahmili grew up in a world of chickpea flour and bottles of rosewater, a world that he would take to America with him.

On a busy street in Tehran, a Farsi sign advertises another Tabrizi Bakery--one that belongs to Tahmili's father.

Much in the same way as his son, the elder Tahmili started low, as a custodian in a bakery. He moved up to chief baker, eventually buying and running his own store.

Tahmili's father visited his son's bakery for the first time several years ago.

"When he came here, he was shocked, because baking is different here," Tahmili says.

"You can do chocolate chip cookies off the box here. [In Iran], it's all handmade."

Tahmili says this commitment to the Persian style of baking sets him apart.

"From the day I opened, all the stuff I make is totally different," he says.

"You have to know something different. People come to my shop, since everything I make is new," he says.

Even the tools he uses are unique.

A large copper disc on the end of a long metal rod is used to make the ingredients for a Persian-style cream puff. A row of small cookie cutters forms the uncommonly shaped chickpea flour cookies.

Coming to America

A relic of the early years of the shop remains, though: an archaic electronic eggbeater, now yellowed, that Tahmili bought for $3 at a garage sale.

For a year and a half after opening the bakery, Tahmili was in debt. "It was very tough, because you don't know the business, you don't have enough customers," he says.

"But I didn't give up. Every time I talked to my father, he said, don't worry. You have a unique shop, you use the best quality. Just keep using the best quality."

But despite Tabrizi's pure-cream frosting and sour lemon syrup, the baking wasn't going as planned.

Boston's humid weather changed the consistency of the recipes meant for Tehran's dry climate.

"I had to have a lot of phone calls in the beginning with my father, discussing when it didn't come out," Tahmili says. "We had to change a lot of our recipes."

Free samples helped the bakery to attract more customers, and foot traffic slowly increased.

But his big break came in 1992 when a pair of New Yorkers visited the area. They suggested that the Middle Eastern goods might be popular in their city, with its sizable Persian population.

To further appeal to the New York contingent, Tahmili made everything kosher.

Every other week, Castellano, Tahmili and Tahmili's wife and cousin make triple batches of assorted pastries to take to New York. When the small store is stacked waist-high with boxes of Persian baklava and Napoleons, Tahmili loads them into his van, drives them to New York and drops them off at the eleven stores that he works with.

Compared to the thriving business in New York, the Watertown store seems quiet.

"Now if you ask me, I think I made a mistake opening here," Tahmili says.

But when he opened in April 1991, there were few other choices. The Iranian population in Watertown was fairly dense.

And more importantly to Tahmili, the rents were low. When he opened Tabrizi, his financial outlook was dim.

In the Beginning

Born in Tabrizi, Iran, Tahmili grew up in Tehran before coming to Boston in the late 1980s.

In Boston, he attended Massachusetts Bay Community College, heading for a degree in computer science.

Debts and bills soon added up, and the $200 Tahmili had brought from Iran, coupled with the $3000 he owed his cousin, proved to be too much. Tahmili dropped out of college.

"I had to work. There was no money coming from home," he says.

He found a job in his future field of food, as a busboy at McDonald's.

It was quite a change from his previous job in Iran, where he supervised 11 employees as the head of a food packaging business.

"I needed to survive in this country. Life is not cheap here," Tahmili explains.

After a few months at McDonald's, Tahmili moved on to a four-year post at a surveying company.

Though he "wasn't going to become a baker," Tahmili says that opinion changed when his cousin pointed out an old shoe repair shop in Watertown.

"I saw the opportunity of this place," Tahmili says. "I fixed everything here--the floor, the paint. We had to work."

The store is now a full-fledged bakery. The back room holds huge ovens, nut grinders, cooling racks and mixers. A working table stands in the center, surrounded by crates of baking equipment and ingredients.

In the shallow front of the store, imported goods from yogurt soda to quince syrup crowd the small shelves.

Tabrizi's symmetrical display cases, filled with neat trays of cookies and pastries, separate the working area from the customer section.

The landlord is making repairs in the kitchen area today, so Tahmili and Castellanos are preparing the cookies in the small cash register area.

Tahmili doesn't consult a recipe book as he, without looking, pours bottles of rosewater, flour and sugar into a large metal bowl.

"All these cookies, I memorized the recipes," he says.

"I could tell you the recipe 200 times; it's not going to come out the same way [as mine]."

"You have to [understand] how it's done," he says. "Recipes go by experience."

Castellanos learned in this manner.

"The first time I cooked, I just made cake," she says softly, pushing a spatula through a mound of dough. "Now, I make everything."

Tabrizi's specialties include zolbi, fried yogurt and starch dipped in honey; piroke, a log-shaped cake with homemade jam and a Danish glaze; nazok, a honey- and sesame-covered dough bar; and small clover-shaped chickpea flour cookies.

Tabrizi is located at 56A Mt. Auburn Street, in Watertown Square.