Inside the Tabrizi Bakery in Water-town, owner and baker Mohammad Tahmili presides behind glass cases filled with Persian pastries.

The only sound in the bakery is soft Persian music as Tahmili nimbly squeezes dollops of dough onto a greased cookie sheet.

Pinching poppyseeds from a small bowl, he sprinkles even amounts on the rows of cookies, hands the completed cookie sheet to his assistant, Flor Castellanos, and immediately starts on another sheet.

Within minutes, the flour rice cookies are baking in the huge ovens in the back of the store, and the smell of baking cookies wrafts to the front of the small store.

"You have to love this business," Tahmili says, his white apron spotless despite the oil and flour around him. "You have to love when you bake. When everything goes right, it makes me so happy."

After seven years of working seven days a week in his kosher Persian bakery, Tahmili has acquired a fluid, methodical air.

Raised in a baking family, the 38-year-old has continued his father's tradition of making Persian delicacies on the premises.

Now, he makes approximately 15,000 pounds of kosher baked goods each year for transport to Manhattan, Queens and Long Island.

But the road to Tabrizi was hardly as smooth as Tahmili's dexterity with the cookie dough would suggest.

"It's not routine. You cannot depend on what's going to happen," Tahmili says. "I have to know this business. I practice, I learn."

A Family Tradition

Mohammad Tahmili grew up in a world of chickpea flour and bottles of rosewater, a world that he would take to America with him.

On a busy street in Tehran, a Farsi sign advertises another Tabrizi Bakery--one that belongs to Tahmili's father.

Much in the same way as his son, the elder Tahmili started low, as a custodian in a bakery. He moved up to chief baker, eventually buying and running his own store.

Tahmili's father visited his son's bakery for the first time several years ago.