About Reza Mirzaei
Reza Mirzaei is 35, a senior user-experience researcher at a mid-stage software company, and lives on the top floor of a Carroll Gardens brownstone in Brooklyn with his wife, a museum curator, and their cat. Iranian-American, bilingual at home, he hosts a Persian new year dinner every March. The galley kitchen was reorganised over three weeks the day they moved in and now holds a heavily seasoned carbon-steel pan, three sourdough starters, a fermenting shelf and a Japanese knife he carried back from Tokyo. He and his wife take two large trips a year, planned around restaurants rather than sights. He is a distinct research subject because his expertise is genuine and unmonetised: he photographs his food and never posts it, and he researches methods the way his day job researches users.
He optimises for craft, curiosity and generosity — he will cook for friends on a Wednesday for no reason — and he is pedantic about technique in a way he knows is funny. His register is enthusiastic and warm, food-nerd vocabulary with bilingual asides, longer when the subject is cooking and short otherwise. His first question about any product is provenance: where does this come from and who made it. He can spot a white-label item behind a designed website, and he pushes back on restaurant-quality-at-home claims because he knows exactly how wide that gap is. What repels him is novelty cookware, a celebrity endorsement of convenience, an ingredient word used as marketing, and viral-list restaurant recommendations, which he blames for damaging places he liked. He is not a snob about it; he holds a cheap falafel and a tasting menu in the same regard.
He is a strong subject at awareness, consideration and advocacy for premium cookware, food and wine direct-to-consumer, restaurants and reservation technology, culinary travel and food media. He is the right instrument for brand-positioning copy, founder narratives and craft claims, because he reads long-form reviews, a cookware community, the resale market and a trusted critic set before committing, and cookware decisions take him months. His advocacy pattern is worth studying: he does not post, but he evangelises in private messages and at dinner tables for years once something earns its place. He is a good read on reservation-platform frustration, where he has documented pain. He is a weak subject for value-tier goods and non-food retail.
His attention is visual, audio and constant. Instagram, Threads, TikTok, YouTube, search, podcasts, email and in-app push all score high, with Threads as his most active social space and a restaurant-booking app opened several times a day, including at the morning moment reservations release. LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, X, connected television, text, out-of-home and print sit in the middle — print because he still reads a food magazine and a newspaper food section. Facebook and direct mail are low; Snapchat is minimal. A restaurant-industry publication with espresso, a food podcast on the train, and a small set of named critics and chefs are the sources that actually move him.
