Over the years, the little shop has become a community center of sorts for immigrants missing the sweet tastes of home.
Today, Mashti Malone’s, which is two doors down from the Lava Lounge, is a fixture in the neighborhood, satisfying locals who flock to the store on weekends. Hollywood has been through ups and downs in the last two decades, and the Shirvanis weathered years when many small businesses went under. Now we tell them, ‘We know this is going to remind you of your grandmother’s perfume….’ Once they try it, they are hooked.” Indeed, 60% of the shop’s retail customers are non-Persian, up from 5% just three years ago. “We didn’t take the retail part of our business very seriously until we saw them react,” said Mehdi.”Everyone thinks of their grandmother’s perfume, of soap, of air fresheners. “It’s just like vanilla here.”)īut sometime in the late ’90s, after an intense one-on-one marketing push to persuade every non-Iranian who walked into the ice cream store to try it, people in the neighborhood started catching on.
1 dessert flavoring in the Middle East,” said Mehdi, who joined his brother here in 1988. Initially, the store sold almost all of its ice cream wholesale, to more than 300 Persian and Armenian restaurants whose customers love the Rosewater flavors that reminded them of home.
He worked as a chef in various restaurants and even opened a restaurant of his own, but he had to return to ice cream, his first love. He came to the United States in 1978 to study electronics. “The people who were beating the ice cream had no necks,” Mashti recalls. Men with iron bars beat the ingredients in barrels until the ice cream was perfect. In those days, they didn’t even have old-fashioned ice cream makers. By ninth grade, he was running the family shop in Iran. Mashti has been making ice cream since he was a child. The Shirvani family has been in the food and ice cream business for more than 70 years. And though he worked his poor hands to the bone Nothing would grow in his hands except stone … “ “Once in a time and a place little known, lived an old farmer named Mashti Malone. Indeed, the name is so outlandish that a group of filmmakers who were shooting in the mini-mall in 1983 and took a shine to Mashti wrote “The Legend of Mashti Malone,” whose fanciful verses now grace the walls of the cheerful shop: When Mashti bought the store, he told her they bought it for her, which made her laugh. The brothers do happen to have a sister-in-law by the name of Malone, who lives in Cape Cod and is married to their older brother, Iraj. “I didn’t have enough money to change it, so I just added Mashti,” he said. At the time, it was an ice cream store called Mugsy Malone. The soft-spoken Mashti, ice cream genius of the duo, bought the establishment in 1980. The multicultural name is merely a product of the layers of history that accumulate in mini-malls around this city, as owner after owner stamps his personality on the establishment, leaving an erratic record that will confound archeologists of the future when they try to piece together Los Angeles at the turn of the 21st century. “We are not Malones,” says Mehdi, the lively younger brother, and salesman of the joint. The store belongs to two brothers, Mashti, 51, and Mehdi Shirvani, 37, who grew up in Mashhad, a small town in northern Iran.
Then there is the Mashti, a $2 ice cream sandwich–a scoop of ice cream squished between two thin wafers, rolled in fresh pistachios. The flavors, which cost $4.95 a pint, have names like Creamy Rosewater, Rosewater Saffron, Ginger Rosewater, Rosewater Sorbet, and Orange Blossom. It heralds an Iranian ice cream parlor, with flavors so exotic they sound like poetry and ingredients that sound as if they must have been harvested from a Persian garden.
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