When she was 7 years old, Bita Rahban’s family immigrated from Iran after the revolution. She remembers her mother, Jaleh, baking all of her birthday cakes prior the family’s move to California. Jaleh and her two sisters invested in a small bakery in Sunset Plaza in West Hollywood before taking over operations at Santa Monica’s Vienna Pastry in the 1980s. Vienna Pastry originally opened in the 1940s, and the sisters kept many of the same menu items while adding Persian specialites. Rahban says their signature is “never saying no'' to a customer's creative requests. Vienna Pastry was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and now a GoFundMe is asking the community for help.
Bita Rahban’s mother, Jaleh Rahban, has been the head cake decorator of Vienna Pastry in Santa Monica since the1980s. Photo courtesy of Vienna Pastry.
