You breathe in the smells of spices the second you walk in the door. Clean linens, elegant white decor, and a ceremonial table filled with items celebrating the Persian New Year. Tucked in the corner of the Shops at Dayton in Englewood, is the Mediterranean restaurant Surena Persian Cuisine.
Owner Aryan Diba opened Surena on February 23, 2016, “One of my favorite parts of being a restaurant owner is the flexibility I have. I get to come and go as I please. I get to take days off that I need off and there’s a lot of flexibility throughout my day.” That is not to say he doesn’t work hard to make the restaurant a success, “My least favorite part is the amount of responsibility that comes along with that. It’s hard to balance being responsible, having flexibility, and making sure things run smoothly.”
Traditional Persian food dots the menu and includes Kashk Bademjan, Mirza Ghasemi, Koobideh Kabob, and daily stews served with saffron basmati rice, “I’m Persian, both my parents are Persian, and I grew up eating Persian food. Funny enough, my mom was a terrible cook. So growing up I hated Persian food,” Diba said, “But once I tried Persian food from a bit of a better cook, I just fell in love with it.”
Diba’s family also owns an international market, so the family had always thought about adding a restaurant since supplies from the market would be easily accessible at wholesale prices, “My dad has been running that business for 30 years and gets really good deals on stuff. So we figured a restaurant and a market would go hand in hand, and that’s what we did.”
Diba thought owning and running a business would never be in the cards for him because his early years were, “pretty wild and crazy growing up, and I’m in recovery.”
He said he never quite knew where his life was headed. Then he got his life together, “Once I got clean my parents and I were talking more about opening up a restaurant. So they helped me out and helped me get this set up and we jumped in headfirst.”
He never dreamed of opening a restaurant, but he credits his parents for pushing him, “I was kind of lost.”
As well as the thousands of small businesses that suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic, Surena was struggling to stay afloat. “When it first happened, we shut the restaurant down completely and it was so sudden that all of my fridges were filled with meats, vegetables, yogurt, all of the things, so I just had to give it away,” Diba said.
When they were able to open the restaurant back up again, they only took takeout orders. This slowed business down quite a bit, “with one server, two cooks, and a dishwasher. That’s all we could get, and that’s what we ran with. If it wasn’t for the PPP loans the government gave out, honestly, my business would have gone under. I applied for both of them and received them, and they kept my business afloat.”
Rebuilding from the pandemic took hard work and a lot of help from the close-knit community who frequented the restaurant. Still, through all the headaches, heartaches, wins, and losses, he wouldn’t change anything, “The people and the work that comes with having a restaurant is stressful. There’s a lot of work to be done, and honestly, it’s not my favorite thing. But the people I work with, I love them, they’re all my people and we all get along very well. We’re all friends, and that just makes things go so much smoother.”
Diba says above everything else, it’s the people who make the business successful, “I think that the environment that I’ve built here, and the people that work here with me is by far my favorite thing about the restaurant. If it wasn’t for all of them, there’s no way this would function. It’s the people that make this place what it is. They pay the bills and serve the food, everyone has their place here. We all work as a team and that’s exactly what it feels like.”
You can visit the restaurant at 9625 E Arapahoe Rd Unit P, Centennial, CO 80112.
