Fardad Khayami’s Perfectly Unreasonable Career

11 Minute read

30 Oct 2026

Chef Fardad Khayami

From boxing in London to cooking in Santa Monica, Muse’s chef-owner has followed his interests with an intensity that now shapes every part of the restaurant.

Investment banking was supposed to be Fardad Khayami’s sensible career choice. He’d already tried getting punched in the head.

Growing up in London, Khayami wanted to be a boxer, and he took it seriously, training hard and competing regularly. The sport had given him confidence after years of struggling with learning difficulties and being bullied at school. But a bad knockout around the age of 16 was enough to make a desk job look appealing.

“Anything I did, I was wholly, wholly invested in it,” he says of his interests growing up. His word for it is “obsessed.”

He also happened to like finance. While attending the University of Southern California, he interned at banks and entered financial modeling competitions. “I love Excel,” he says. Cooking, meanwhile, helped keep his grocery bill down. His roommates bought the food; he made dinner.

Then the neighbors tasted the leftovers and asked if he could cook for them, too. They came back with friends, who brought more friends, until his small apartment was filling with people expecting dinner.

“I was taking this accounting class, and I was really motivated to make a balance sheet,” he says. So, he started charging his new customers five bucks.

With his roommate David Gelland, he developed the dinners into Museum, changing the entire menu every week. This was still a student apartment, although the prices were beginning to suggest otherwise. “At the end, we were charging about $150 a ticket.”

Even then, Khayami initially resisted the suggestion that he should open an actual restaurant. A perfectly reasonable position, if only he could leave well enough alone.

Instead, Muse opened in August 2024 in the former Mason supper club space on West Channel Road in Santa Monica. Marc Ange, whom Khayami met through his barber, designed the interiors.

Ange designed the chairs, tables, bar, and banquettes specifically for the restaurant, with a mirrored ceiling giving diners an overhead view of the evening’s proceedings. The walls have their own exhibition schedule, with a rotating art program that opened with works by Joan Miró.

Muse gives Khayami an entire evening to get involved in, from what guests eat to what they hear and how they’re looked after. “The restaurant is just a collection of the things that we all love,” he says. “This is the music I like. This is a style of service that I like. It’s hospitality that I like.”

He has opinions about how staff should stand when pouring water, how they should move through the dining room, and how a table should be cleared. “Hospitality and service are two different things. I think it’s a dying art of just like really caring service, making every single guest feel incredibly cared for.” Guests should have considerably less to think about. “All they have to do is sit down and enjoy.”

Khayami spends much of service in the dining room. “I like to be on the floor with our guests,” he says. In the kitchen, he develops dishes with a team whose experience he is quick to acknowledge.

“I’ve got a lack of experience, for sure, but there’s so many resources everywhere, including my amazing team,” he says. “Our kitchen right now is a big collaboration.”

He is still working out what will make a dish recognizably his. “The way I focus is very simple. I like things to be bold, like things to be incredibly flavorful, like things to be delicious. I don’t think things should be too precious.”

An experiment in the kitchen had gone wrong the previous day. “I make so many mistakes in the kitchen. I fuck things up all the time,” he says, then reconsiders. “No, I shouldn’t say all the time.” His plan for the next attempt: “I’m gonna try and do that tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow, until I get it completely, completely, completely right.”

The menu ranges from veal bonbons and hamachi crudo to swordfish with Thai chiles, drawing on French technique and seasonal California produce. Khayami’s interests leave room for a few departures from the French repertoire.

The kitchen’s secret weapon, though, is his younger brother, Nikdad, whose pastry deserves attention well before dessert. His brioche feuilletée arrives with softened Bordier butter, its crisp exterior giving way to tender, buttery layers. It is perfect. The butter is hardly necessary, but that’s no reason to leave it alone.

At Muse, a dish can spend weeks in development as the team works through its components, sauces, and techniques. He also wants to know what his cooking would look like with fewer rules. He already has plans for another restaurant.

“Dealing with the city had its challenges and frustrations, so I promised myself I would never do it again,” he says of opening Muse.

For Khayami, it was an impossible promise to keep. When thinking about his plans for the next restaurant, he said he wants to come back from the market and decide what to cook that night. “Unfortunately, I’m quite motivated to open this restaurant,” he says. “The food is going to be slightly more free, if that makes sense.” He wants to cook “just whatever is in the heart that day.”

That freedom would give him more room to bring his Iranian background into the cooking while keeping its French foundation. He already has one dish in mind: braised lamb neck, crisp outside and tender within. Lamb stew was a weekly fixture growing up, with leftovers the following day. He wants more of the menu to be “directly based on childhood memories and childhood emotions.”

Nikdad will also oversee pastry at the new restaurant, planned for the former Olivetta space in West Hollywood with a summer 2027 opening target. A bakery during the day will give way to dinner in the evening.

His employees are part of the plan, too. Muse is small, and some are ready for promotions he doesn’t have positions to offer. A second restaurant would give them somewhere to grow.

He already has food he wants to cook, his brother’s pastry to build around, and employees he wants to see running the place. Those things have a stronger hold on him than a vow to never do this again. “Unfortunately, we have a vision and a passion, which is very unfortunate.”

The boxer, the finance geek, and the student charging for dinner in his dorm have all found something to do at Muse. The result deserves considerably more attention than it gets: this is one of the best restaurants in Los Angeles, with two young brothers already giving the city plenty to get excited about. Khayami may occasionally wish he could leave well enough alone. Anyone who has eaten here should be grateful he can’t.

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About the author

Paul Feinstein is the Managing Editor of Fine Dining Lovers and has been writing and editing in Los Angeles and around the world for more than two decades.

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