After trying his hand at fine dining with two short-lived, high end restaurants, 48-year-old Ardi Entezam is now flipping burgers, slicing potatoes and making fries at a walk-up fast food spot located inside the Westfield Century City mall in Los Angeles.
But the Studio City resident says this is the place he was always meant to be.
Entezam is on a mission and this isn’t a typical fast food joint.
“I want to feed people the foods that they crave and desire in the most fast way, but while still giving them the highest quality standards of organic food, because that’s what people deserve,” said Entezam, who opened Ardi’s Organics in the busy food court on Sept. 6.
Focusing on all organic ingredients, which means sourcing food grown without synthetic chemicals like pesticides, hormones, fertilizers and GMOs, plus offering gluten free vegan and vegetarian options, at first glance, Entezam’s menu reads mostly like any other fast food spot.
There’s a classic cheeseburger, a nacho cheeseburger, but then there’s also a sweet pea burger. There are regular fries and sweet yam cubes as side options on the menu, too.
“It’s all food that won’t make your stomach hurt,” he said. “That’s because our customers are eating real beef, not injected with anything, so your body is consuming it in a real natural way.”
Entezam, who immigrated to the United States from Iran as a young boy, got his start in the restaurant business at the age of 12 when he got a gig at a pizza joint; he started off as a cashier before working his way up to waiter and busboy to help his mom with the family finances.
Later in life, he moved on to other endeavors including a cigar business selling humidors.
But he was back in the restaurant business by the early ’00s and Entezam risked all of his life savings to open two fine dining restaurants in Los Angeles. One of those restaurants was a Chinese fusion spot called Empress and another was a sushi restaurant named Sushi on Sunset.
In both cases, the risk wasn’t worth the reward as the eateries didn’t last. Entezam was hit hard financially and ended up homeless for nearly a year.
“I ended up couch surfing a lot at friends’ houses,” he said.
He eventually got back into the business, working as a waiter at Marmalade Cafe in Malibu for about a decade before he finally decided to jump into the fast food business. But, he wanted to approach things differently this time.
One of the most noticeable things that sets Ardi’s Organics apart from its fast food peers are the buns.
They’re soft, warm, fluffy as clouds and made in house daily.
“We created the recipe for our own custom hamburger buns,” he said. “We have no oil in our hamburger buns, we make them from scratch here, they’re one hundred percent vegan.”
Meanwhile, the beef patties are thin with a slightly charred rim, reminiscent of a smash burger.
“It’s an in-between type of smash burger,” he explained. “The beef is so rich that even though the patty looks small and the hamburger looks small, it’s such a well-rounded, naturally put together burger that everything about it is real and delicious.”
The sweet pea burger is Ardi’s offering to those seeking a vegan burger option, eschewing things like rice, mushroom or corn, which can be found in most vegetable patties.
“I wanted to do something different, so one night it came to me to create a yam, chickpea, red and yellow bell pepper patty with my own seasonings in it,” he said. “It’s just very different from anything else and with the bun, it becomes a vegan burger.”
And the sweet yam cubes were a late addition to the menu.
“That came because I didn’t want to do just another French fry,” he said. “We started playing with the yam and we created it and infused it with maple syrup, put some sea salt and then we bake it and then we lightly fry them in organic sunflower oil.”
While his two other restaurants didn’t pan out, Entezam thinks he’s finally found his real calling in slinging fast food his own way.
“I’m giving you the best quality food I can and I’m hand making everything,” he said.
Ardi’s Organics
Where: Westfield Century City Mall, 10250 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles.
Hours: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Sundays
More information: ardisorganics.com
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