Fifteen cooks, one kitchen stacked three floors high, and a clock that never stops running — Sar Ashpaz drops contestants from wildly different culinary worlds into a single competition and watches who rises. Hosted by Payman Talebi and directed by Pouria Malekabadi, this 2026 Persian-language series adapts the international Next Level Chef format for Iranian audiences.
What is Sar Ashpaz about?
The competitors are deliberately mismatched: professional restaurant chefs share the roster with home cooks, food bloggers, and homemakers whose training happened entirely at the family stove. The show's signature is its tiered kitchen — three levels of workspace where equipment and ingredients differ dramatically from floor to floor, so a cook's position in the building can matter as much as their knife skills. Each seventy-five-minute episode pushes the field through timed challenges, and performance decides who climbs toward the better-equipped upper kitchen and who slides down toward the bare-bones basement before elimination thins the group.
About the cast
Payman Talebi fronts the series as host, keeping the pace brisk across the long episodes and drawing out the personalities behind the aprons. Behind the camera, director Pouria Malekabadi manages the logistical puzzle of filming simultaneous cooking on three separate levels without losing the thread of any single contestant's run.
Context & significance
Competitive cooking shows have become one of the most reliable genres in Persian-language entertainment, and Sar Ashpaz arrives as one of the more ambitious swings: licensed-format television with a purpose-built multi-story set rather than a simple studio kitchen. The mix of industrial chefs against self-taught home cooks gives the series a built-in underdog storyline every season, and the tier mechanic means fortunes reverse week to week. For diaspora viewers, it is also a window into how contemporary Iranian food culture blends tradition with global restaurant technique.
Watching Sar Ashpaz on K-Time
Sar Ashpaz streams on K-Time — reading this page requires nothing, but watching episodes takes a quick sign-in with a free account. The whole K-Time experience runs in Persian, made for Iranians abroad who want their series, films, and shows in one place.