Midtown Lunch

When Naan Hut opened at the beginning of the year on Santa Monica Blvd. in West L.A., fans of freshly baked sangak who live or work on the westside rejoiced. The ironing board sized bread is the hallmark of any truly great Persian bakery, and those of us who live or work on the westside were excited to not have to drive all the way to the Valley for fresh baked sangak goodness. As a fan of lunch I was also excited that they were serving chicken and beef kebabs with sangak for $6-8.

Back when they first opened the “menu” was clearly a work in progress, scrawled on sheets of paper hanging on the walls. But the other day I was wandering past the store and noticed they have upgraded to a full printed menu, which not only offers kebabs and sandwich, but also includes something called sangak pizza. “What the hell is that?” you might be asking. Well, it’s exactly what you might imagine it to be…

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There aren’t many things that are better than fresh baked bread, and it hardly gets fresher than sangak made from a real Persian bakery. Often referred to as “Iran’s national bread”, the first time I had sangak was at Attari Grill, where the small piece of flatbread came wrapped around a delicious koobideh kebab as part of lunch. But nothing can compare to seeing one of these four foot long surfboards of warm sour dough flatbread coming fresh out of a gigantic lazy susan’ish oven looking thing. There are no shortage of these bakeries in the valley (Asal Bakery in Woodland Hills is well worth the drive) but in the Midtown Lunch area between Downtown and Santa Monica? Not so much.

So I was super excited to hear that the (unfortunately named) Naan Hut, on Santa Monica Blvd in West L.A. had nothing to do with Indian bread… and was actually a real deal Persian sangak bakery, just like the places in the valley.

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