Friday marked the last day of business for Taste Of Persia, a beloved local Persian restaurant that has long been nestled inside of Pizza Paradise, a nondescript pizza place in the Flatiron district that was recently taken over by new owners. (In December, Taste of Persia's owner Saeed Pourkay said he was informed that those new owners wanted to "move in a different direction" and he would need to vacate the space.) Friends of Pourkay launched a GoFundMe last week to help raise money for him to open up shop in a new space in the same area. However, before he could even consider his next move, he returned to Pizza Paradise over the weekend to pick up some belongings and discovered that the new owners had opened a copycat business called Tasty Persia. He claims they also stole his recipes.

"He copied my name, he copied my recipes, exactly the same way that you see, this is what I did for the past eight years," Pourkay says in the video below, fighting back tears outside of Pizza Paradise. "In a matter of a day, [the new owner of Pizza Paradise] ruined my life, to the point that after so many years, working so hard, he stole everything from me."

Pourkay told Gothamist that after closing up on Friday, he loaded up as much of his equipment as he could into a truck, but still had a few items, including a refrigerator, a freezer, a table, and some food he had prepared last week and left in the fridge, to collect. When he returned on Sunday to pick the rest of his stuff up, he found out that the owners had opened up Tasty Persia in his old spot.

"As soon as I left there, they started setting up the way that you saw [in the video]," he told Gothamist. "And the next day, immediately, they started selling my food that was in that refrigerator, under the name Tasty Persia."

"They surprised me," he added. "I was planning to go to Tehran, and they thought that I was not coming back."

He says that the new owners also refused to let him inside—you can see police officers talking to the new owners, and not letting Pourkay inside the store, in another video uploaded to Facebook.

Pourkay also claims that the new owners had been closely monitoring him, and even installed a video camera in the kitchen, in order to learn his recipes: "What they did for the past month and a half or so, they had one person in the kitchen constantly watching me, and they had a video [camera], they stole my recipes. They started copying the cooking the same way that I used to do."

Saeed Pourkay, the owner of Taste Of Persia

GoFundMe

Pourkay, who emigrated to NYC from Tehran, ran a print shop on 18th Street for two decades before cashing out and becoming a professional cook. "I pursued something that I enjoy doing, [and it has given] my life a meaning," he told Gothamist. "It took me a long time [to find it]. I got divorced from my wife because she asked me, 'What are you doing?'...I was homeless and sleeping in the Navy Yard between the boxes."

He first developed a following at the Union Square holiday market selling ash reshteh (a popular, thick soup) before he opened the location inside Pizza Paradise on 12 West 18th Street in early 2013. "I started making soup, which gradually became somehow famous, not like the Soup Nazi, but it became famous," he said. "It's been exhausting for the past eight years. I took like two days vacation, which was the Christmas time and Thanksgiving. And I've been working so hard, and for someone like them to come and steal my identity, it was very, very painful."

Pourkay, who has since cancelled his planned trip to Tehran he was supposed to take this week, said he is considering legal action against the new owners. But he noted that he never had a written agreement with either the old or new owners for his rent ("Everything there was based on honesty") and he always paid in cash, because the owners in turn paid cash to the landlord: "So there is no paperwork involved. It was all based on trust."

Gothamist has reached out to the new owners for comment. One of them, Fouad Jaber, told Grub Street that the name Tasty Persia NYC is temporary. He denied running "a copycat business," but also said: "I have the right to sell what I want in my store.”

Since the videos were first put on Facebook on Sunday, Pourkay noted that the Tasty Persia sign has been taken down. Another owner of Pizza Paradise, Thogan Magableh told Eater that "he has taken down the Tasty Persia branding and no longer plans to sell Persian food from the pizzeria."

When reached by Gothamist on Monday, Pourkay was still very emotional about what had transpired: "If you see my video, you know, I cried," he said. "It's just something that you build up over so many years, and build up clientele. And I'm very, very kind to people, showing Iranian generosity. And everybody somehow loved me. There was [a customer who said] that even though United Nations is 20 blocks away, the real ambassador of Iran is on 18th Street making soup."