I've grown up in a Persian household, so I know about Persian cooking. Persia and the Arab countries have very different climates. Persia is a temperate climate, more like Europe. They use a lot of vegetables and herbs in Persian cooking. Persians are culturally really still Zoroastrians. They recite old Persian poetry that talks about fruit-tree flowers and stuff and believe in tons of stupid herbal remedy stuff - every herb heals something or every food is good for something, without any real explanation. My grandfather always recites this poem that goes something like "My girlfriend's cheek is red like the radish and the white of her eye is white likes it flesh" The best analogy I can come up with is medieval Europe.
So their food is based on this reverance for temperate herbs, fruits, and vegetables, but with a complete lack of any cooking skill or logic. They just take a bunch of vegetables and whatever they have lying around and throw it into a pot. They also add this dried lime thing that makes everything taste horrible, and they add it to like half their dishes. I really doubt if there are any Iranian cooks who know barely anything about cooking, the most they ever know is how to make good kebab. For example, whenever my father roasts hazelnuts, he coats them with lemon and salt, but he roasts them IN THE SHELL, so I try to explain to him that none of that flavor will actually go onto the actual nut, but he just insists this is the way they did it back in Iran. I've asked if maybe this is so that you can suck the shell sometimes to get the salty tart flavor, but sometimes he says yes, sometimes he says no, and either way he doesn't suck the shell, so it's still pointless. The only way he can answer is that this is what they did back in Iran. Iranians truly don't know how to cook other than direct copying. My mother spends who knows how much on authentic Iranian saffron, and everyday uses it on rice that she makes undercooked, dry and mealy. They'll regularly have no idea what it even is they're putting into a dish - they'll just buy the herb/spice mix package - they know that it's the right mix for the dish, but if it weren't pre-packaged, they wouldn't know what ingredients to buy to make it from scratch. They either severly undersalt the food, or don't salt it at all, because they honestly don't understand that they need to. Every dessert has the same pistachio-rosewater-saffron taste, no matter how different they look. In short, Iranians are like the opposite of the French or Thai when it comes to the kitchen.
I understand that when you go to a Persian restaurant, it usually tastes good, but you have to understand these are catered to American tastes, and everybody only really kebab there anyway. Plus they're running a restaurant, so they HAVE to make it taste good or they'll go out of business. Outside of the restaurant industry, Iranians are horrible cooks, as described above.
The only real part of Iranian cuisine that would taste good is the fruit. The fruit in Iran is probably amazing, since they have a good climate there for temperate fruits, and they probably have good-tasting, old varieties. They also have a wider variety of fruits there - they still eat Medlars, which the West hasn't eaten since like medieval times, and they eat other fruits that have been lost to time for us (cornelian cherries, hawthorn, jujubes, etc.)