Iran Closes Coffee Chain Whose Cups Mocked Supreme Leader Khamenei's Death

A 51-year-old painting of an empty chair, originally created for a children's film festival, cost Tehran's most recognizable coffee chain its doors on Saturday. Iranian authorities ordered the shuttering and sealing of Lamiz cafe branches in the capital after hardliners in the regime interpreted the chain's Nowruz takeaway cups as mocking the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The cups featured a 1975 work by Iranian artist Farshid Mesghali depicting an empty chair surrounded by a shower of colorful purple and red droplets. The painting predates the 1979 Iranian Revolution by four years and was originally commissioned as the official artwork for the 10th Tehran International Festival of Films for Children and Young Adults. That provenance provided no protection: the Tasnim and Mehr news agencies reported that branches of Lamiz in Tehran were "shuttered and sealed on the orders of the judiciary" and that the cafe had "designed suspicious designs against the martyred imam on its products in recent days."

Lamiz, routinely described as the Starbucks of Tehran, operates more than 20 branches in the capital and additional locations outside it. Persian-language media based outside Iran identified the specific political reading: the empty chair was seen by authorities as a comment on Khamenei's death and on the failure of his son and named successor, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, to appear in public since being designated. Only the Tehran branches are believed to have been affected by the closure order.

The chain pushed back immediately. In a statement posted to its social media channels before those accounts were also closed, Lamiz said: "The cups have no connection whatsoever to recent events their production, from final design approval to printing, was completed over several months, and their full delivery to warehouses had already taken place before these events began." The company said the designs were part of a tradition of producing special cups for Nowruz, the Iranian New Year celebrated this month.

The closure landed weeks after the death of Ali Khamenei, who had ruled Iran since 1989. Iranian state agencies themselves described him in the Lamiz case as "the martyred imam." His son Mojtaba Khamenei was named successor but has not appeared publicly since. In that context, hardliners read Mesghali's image of a vacant seat showered in color not as a seasonal greeting but as a statement about who was no longer sitting in power.

Lamiz had long filled a particular niche in Tehran's social life. In a country where alcohol is prohibited, the chain's branches served as gathering places and artistic hubs for younger Iranians, part of a broader surge in specialty cafe culture across the city. That visibility apparently made even a half-century-old painting of a chair impossible to display without consequence.