572 Jomhuri Avenue, between Ferdosi and 30 Tir Street, Tehran, Iran, tel +98 21 66708610

Just south of Tehran’s Ferdosi Square and deep in the city’s traditional Armenian quarter is Hotel Naderi, Iran’s very first hotel, or so its proprietors claim. The creation of an Armenian immigrant (arrived via Baku) who went by the name Khachik, Hotel Naderi opened at the turn of the twentieth century to cater to the itinerant Orientalist, the occasional Iranian businessman and the somewhat more occasional philandering husband. Today, Naderi and its adjacent café, restaurant, and patisserie live on, a tribute to classic cool and a stubborn rebuke to the newer-is-better tendencies of the capital as we know it today.

Step into Naderi’s lobby and little seems to have changed in the more than one hundred years that it has been open. Lime green wallpaper still hangs, delicate French chairs remain and an antique wooden phone sits begging to be used. Where a fully stocked bar once stood-pre-Islamic revolution and the particular mores that came with it-is a quaint sitting area and a view to the hotel’s pleasant back garden. Behind the front counter sits Mr. Badaghi, welcoming guests and manning the ancient German switchboard that connects him to the hotel’s twenty-four rooms upstairs. Badaghi has been working at Naderi since the age of 20-well before the Revolution, he announces, though he will not reveal much more than that.

Despite the impeccable conservation of the lobby, much of the hotel and the surrounding neighborhood has changed. Gone are most of the Armenians, the businessmen who lived and played well during the Shah’s reign, the American tourists and the alcohol hawkers next door, as well as the cosmopolitan air that made the place magnetic and somehow emblematic of a Tehran that mixed the best of East and West.

Before the revolution, the hotel’s courtyard (since closed) could hold upwards of two thousand people. A resident band from Italy played jazz numbers here every night. Revolutionary thinkers, artists, and intellectuals held court at Naderi, each with a corner to call his own-inflammatory Jalal Al-e Ahmad and literary greats Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh and Sadeq Hedayat were just a few of them.

Today, a room at Hotel Naderi costs $15 for a single bed and $30 for a double-a considerably good deal in comparison with the needlessly inflated prices of the hotels uptown. No breakfast is included, though the adjoining restaurant is open all day through the evening. Rooms are clean and simple, and if you’re lucky you may find an Art Deco phone or Frigidaire within. Most of Naderi’s guests these days are young, and certainly not fussy-curiously adventurous Europeans, along with the rare Japanese or American. Gone is Mrs. Kakoubian, a slightly off-kilter, perfectly coiffed, posh Armenian who made her home in the hotel for fifteen years before the revolution, and the retired general who also wandered the hotel’s halls as a permanent guest.

Some things are more resistant to change. At Café Naderi, the Turkish coffee continues to run delightfully thick and the crème glace is inevitably superb. Brooding young side-burned boys toting works by the deceased Iranian literary goddess/cult figure Forough Farokhzad cavort with cute girls sporting Tajik headscarves (all the rage) and contemporary art books in translation. Tweed-clad, aging artists, poets and self-appointed authorities on a variety of topics are staples, and émigrés and exiles occasionally pass through Naderi’s smoke-filled boundaries-back in Iran for the first time since the revolution and usually pleased that at least one corner of the city remains somewhat familiar. Café Naderi’s waitstaff seems hardly to have changed in years-uniformly geriatric but looking sharp all the same in their wrinkly, mauve serving uniforms. The original menu also remains; while the beef stroganoff may be tough and the veal suspiciously slimy, the chicken and meat kabob rarely go wrong.

But all of that hardly matters. In the end, Naderi is a link to the past, a haunt well suited to the impossibly nostalgic. Come here to pay tribute to Iranian legends of years past amid the aura of an era long, long gone.