Paymon's Fresh Kitchen and Lounge

"Most award winning restaurant in Las Vegas. Zagat rated and Best of Las Vegas 30x award winner!"

"The true multi-national cuisine - healthy, tasty, affordable!"

In 1988, Paymon Raouf opened a small café featuring Middle Eastern delights that paired well with his robust Arabic coffee. It quickly grew into an intimate local spot attracting diners looking for an ethnic cultural experience not readily in Las Vegas at the time. Since then, it evolved in many ways as an independent operator featuring not only great tasting dishes and libations, but doing them with a health-conscious approach, avoiding trans, artificial additives and preservatives, limiting saturated fats while also presenting delicious vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free dishes long before the terms broke into the public consciousness.

In 2000, Paymon teamed up with Jeff Ecker, President of Restaurant Consultants of Las Vegas to oversee day to day operations and lead the business development. This duo has been intact ever since. In 2020, Paymon’s Mediterranean Café and Lounge announced it was changing its name after over 31 years to Paymon’s Fresh Kitchen and Lounge. This formal change is an outward declaration of how Paymon’s has been sourcing the freshest available ingredients for creative dishes from around the world.

“In the over three decades since we first opened our doors, we’ve grown in a number of ways,” said Paymon Raouf, founder and owner of Paymon's. “We started with a dozen items and 900 square feet. We now have four pages of menu options for two full-size restaurants and two lounges that also turn into dance and music spots on the weekends with nightclub-style DJs.”

Despite the growth, the company has continued its use of fresh ingredients in its made from scratch methodology and smart preparation and cooking techniques to ensure its award-winning quality, such as small refrigerated space to force the kitchen to prepare only small batches, thereby keeping all the food as fresh as possible. That has not prevented the chefs from exploring cuisines from across the Mediterranean and beyond.

“We have dishes from Italy, Greece, and the Middle East,” said Raouf. “Over the years, we’ve also added American, South American and even Indian dishes, not to mention our huge house favorite: Athens Fries. We looked back at how we’ve changed with, and even ahead of, the times and realized we also need to change our name to reflect who we are today.”