ABSTRACT
On a Sunday evening in June 1998, a small crowd of Iranians gathered outside a fairly well-known Iranian confectionery/grocery in London to watch the televised World Cup football match between Iran and the USA. The Iranian residents in the area were known for their relative wealth and were among the first to leave Iran for the West in the wake, or even in anticipation, of the popular uprising that toppled the Pahlavi state in 1978-9. The shop supplied a wide range of Iranian food, raw and cooked, some prepared in the UK and some imported from Iran. The food included fresh ‘halal’ meat, Iranian delicacies and groceries and fruits and vegetables. Like several other neatly decorated Iranian shops and restaurants in the area, the multipurpose shop presented itself as a place for a cosmopolitan demonstration of taste for quality and imported food. Although the shop served the Iranian customers with a wide variety of ‘home’ items, their visits to the shop were disguised behind its public image as a provider of exotic food, access to which was an established local bourgeoisie habit.2 The combined emphasis on imported and quality food evoked the image of a delicatessen where tension arising from foreignness was defused in the quest for the exotic involving the ‘modern’ experience of ‘conjoining of the ephemeral and the fleeting with the eternal and the immutable’ (Harvey 1989: 10). This was despite the fact that for the bulk of its Iranian customers the shop provided not so much the site of an ostentatiously bourgeois excursion into the exotic as a surreptitious return to ‘home’.
