“Around 600 years after Christ, a shepherd found some dry seeds under a bush while grazing his sheep and goats on the mountain slopes of the Iranian plateau,” the owner of Tehran’s popular Raees Coffee chain of cafes said. While his history of coffee may be obscure and certainly unheard of in the West, Aslani’s cafes and the growing popularity of coffee houses in Iran offering Wi-Fi, snacks, hot drinks and a place to hang out will be strikingly familiar to coffee culture enthusiasts from London to Los Angeles.
