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Las Vegas has its share of success stories, but Paymon Raouf’s story may top the list. Nearly 40 years ago, the Iranian immigrant hopped on a plane to Vegas through a refugee program in search of a new life. He’s since become a reputable force in the local food scene, establishing Paymon’s Mediterranean Lounge & Cafe on Maryland Parkway in 1988 as a leader in Mediterranean cuisine, and later as a full-fledged hookah lounge.
“The pressure was on me, in a way, to be able to establish this, to be able to continue this,” Raouf says, gesturing around the hookah den of Paymon’s Fresh Kitchen & Lounge, a location he opened 21 years ago on Sahara Avenue. “I continuously had to innovate the way we do things, to be able to introduce it to American culture, to accept it into becoming their own. Today, hookah and hookah lounges are not a distant thing anymore.”
In 2023, the City of Las Vegas dubbed Paymon’s Fresh Kitchen & Lounge “America’s First Hookah Lounge.” The Weekly sat down with Raouf to discuss his enduring legacy, how elders played a role in his recipes and more.
By now, I imagine you know a generation of regulars who have been eating at your restaurants for years.
I grew up with them. We became friends and family. I remember one day I was standing in the front and I was greeting people. A lady about your age came from the bathroom with her 7 year-old daughter and said, “Are you Paymon?” I said, “Yes. How are you? Is everything okay?” She gave me a look and said, “Do you remember me?” I’m looking at her, I’m looking at the kid. I say, “Should I?” [Laughs.] She said, “I used to come to your restaurant with my parents when I was 7 years old. Now I come to your restaurant with my 7-year-old.” That’s why, when you said one generation, I want to tell you no, it’s three generations.
I have tables where they come in, the grandma and grandpa, their kid and their grandkids, and all three of them, for years, they’ve come to Paymon’s. Those are the reasons that I’m still in this business. The dining room becomes your home.
How did you get started in Vegas?
At the end of 1987, I came through a refugee program through Catholic Charities. They sent me right to Las Vegas. I had two jobs as a dishwasher and a busboy in two different hotels, working 16 hours a day with no car. Those days, it was very hard. So I saved my money, and I opened a small grocery store called Eastern Bazaar with my brother. It wasn’t very successful, just selling groceries to a very small handful of the Middle Eastern community. So I started selling food little by little. I had a little deli case, and a gentleman walked in and said, “What do you got to eat?” I wasn’t a restaurant. I was just a grocery store. And because I was desperate to pay rent, I said, “What would you like? [Laughs.] I have all these cold cuts, I can make you a sandwich.” That was my first experience in the restaurant business.
He came back the next day with two more guys and said, “That sandwich was good. Give me two more.” I said, “Gee, I can make some money doing that.”
Little by little, when older ladies came in to buy groceries—Greek ladies, Turkish ladies, Armenians, Arabs, Persians—when they came in, I exchanged recipes for $50 groceries. I gave them $50 worth of groceries, and they gave me a recipe for hummus, a recipe for falafel and a recipe for different things from different regions.
That’s amazing. I love that.
The coolest thing about it was most of these ladies, they were housewives; traditional Middle Eastern housewives. So they never earned money themselves. What they knew most, like my own mother, was taking care of family and cooking for family.
I get emotional about this. When they went home with handfuls of groceries, they went home and showed off to their husbands what they did. It’s actually the first time they monetized. Besides taking care of family and washing clothes and cleaning the home, they were actually participating. That made Paymon feel really good.
What was your early relationship with hookah like?
I’m from Iran, so when I was a kid I used to make hookah for my dad when he’d come from work. I liked doing it. It wasn’t a chore, but it was something that my dad would say, “Hey, Paymon, can you make me hookah?” I was very excited to do that, because you’re playing with the fire, you’re doing all that stuff. It was really interesting.
So how exactly did Paymon’s become “America’s First Hookah Lounge?”
In the year 1999, at the Maryland location, there was a patio hallway in the middle and then there was a hookah lounge. Before the hookah lounge, I used that room during the day. I put a big TV in there for all these stock traders. They used to come over there for lunch … so they could watch MSNBC. The day that the market was good, it was a good feeling. The day that the market was down, I felt negativity. So I decided to change something in that room. I wanted to build a tea house. I traveled to different places in America. I even traveled to China, so I could learn more and more about tea. But Vegas was not ready for a tea house at the time. We’re talking about 1999. So one day I was thinking, how about if I serve hookah?
How challenging was it to get that idea off the ground?
First, I talked to my attorney, and he said, “You’re out of your mind.” In those days, Philip Morris [International, a multinational tobacco company] was being sued by many different states, and there was a multi-billion dollar lawsuit going on. I heard the concern, and I wanted to see how I could protect myself. So I made the apparatus. I made bowls with a clip and all that because people were not educated enough. I was afraid that people would touch the charcoal. The most important one [to get approval from] was the health department. I took a hookah, put it in the duffel bag, and went over there. Then they said, “What’s in it? What do you want to do?” I showed them the hookah, and the guy started laughing at me. He said, “Are you serious? You want to serve a bong?” I said, “It’s not a bong, it is a water pipe!” After some back and forth, I got their blessing.
What happened next?
I said OK, I’m gonna do it, even though my own father, who was smoking a hookah at the time, said, “You’re nuts. You can’t do that because this culture is not ready. They don’t know it.” There were hookah cafes that were mostly traditional hookah cafes with mostly Middle Eastern men. There were no mouthpieces. There were people passing the hookahs, and they were smoking real tobacco, serving coffee and tea. And they were playing some Middle Eastern music. It wasn’t inviting to the American crowd. So I pretty much westernized the experience. I brought in the alcohol, nice cocktails and played nice American music. The staff, they were all American staff. I brought the old world … into the new world standard—the American standard.
It feels like everyone wants Mediterranean food now, and hookah is everywhere. How do you keep Paymon’s fresh after almost 40 years?
If you love what you do, you want to make things better every day. You’re looking for new ways of doing things, new ingredients, new recipes. That’s why our menu is so big. We offer Italian, we offer Greek, we offer Lebanese food, Persian food, Indian food, gluten free. We are true Mediterranean. A lot of places these days consider themselves Mediterranean, but they are only Greek. We have so many items that it covers the whole Mediterranean region. India is not in the Mediterranean. Iran is not a Mediterranean region, but those are the items that are well-known and consumed in the Mediterranean region.
Because everything is getting expensive, everybody, they are looking to cut a corner somewhere to be able to stay in business, to be profitable. But believe it or not, I’m looking for better ingredients to be able to produce a better dish because I feel people are getting educated every day on social media, Food Network and so forth. People want to know what they’re consuming. If people are getting more educated every day about what they eat, we need to offer them items that they want.
That’s a great quality olive oil, great quality kalamata olives, a good cheese. If I’m gonna eat here every day, and my staff and my customers, we better have great ingredients and great flavors so we can satisfy their needs.
Would you ever consider passing the legacy of the lounge and the restaurant down to your kids so they can continue it?
I don’t want to insult myself and other restaurateurs, but kids these days, they can make easier money. This is a lot of hard work and more power to them. Everybody’s got to follow their own passion. I am 62 years old, and I like to believe I’ll be able to do this for another maybe 20 if I can. If I can come in with a walker, I’d like to come in and do it. Hopefully I’ll be able to do this for a long life.
PAYMON’S FRESH KITCHEN & LOUNGE 8380 W. Sahara Ave. #150, 702-804-0293, paymons.com. Sunday-Thursday, noon-midnight; Friday & Saturday, noon-1 a.m.
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