Cody Ma

The Climb

co-owner since 2024 (or remove the 2021 start date) The title marks a sustained stake in the restaurant’s daily making, where identity is not fixed on paper but reinforced through service, repetition, and follow-through. Since 2021, Ma has been part of the team shaping Azizam’s direction, working where hospitality, memory, and execution meet.

Today

At the Los Angeles restaurant, Ma is chef and co-owner. In practice, that places his work inside the restaurant’s tempo and character, in the details that separate a place with a point of view from one that simply follows the room. In Los Angeles, where the field is crowded and standards are visible, Azizam has to earn attention through consistency, warmth, and clarity. Ma’s role is central to that effort.

Signature

Cody's signature dishes include Kofteh Tabrizi. Within Azizam’s kitchen, the dish reads as a marker of the restaurant’s approach: deliberate, layered, and built with attention. It asks for time, and in that regard reflects the values behind the cooking. In Ma’s hands, signature work is about staying power rather than display.

In Their Words The quote places food in its practical role as a bridge when language is limited. It points to the table as a working space for connection, where memory and care can be carried through repetition, flavor, and labor. For Ma, that makes the restaurant part of a family line as much as a professional one.

Recognition

In 2024, the restaurant’s flagship dish was Kofteh Tabrizi, a large, labor-intensive meatball made with five to six herbs, rice, split peas, fruit, walnuts, apricots, and dried barberries. The dish’s structure suggests a lot of moving parts brought into one form, and that complexity tracks with the kind of work Ma is associated with: measured, detailed, and built on the premise that effort is readable in the finished plate.