Before he was a restaurateur, Mashayekh was a soldier. He and John Davoudi served together in the Iranian Army during the Pahlavi era, forming a friendship that would outlast the regime. After the Iranian Revolution upended their lives, both men emigrated to the United States. Mashayekh settled first in Santa Maria, California, a small agricultural city on the Central Coast, where he met and married a woman with a young son named Scott Cooper. The family relocated to San Jose so Mashayekh could attend San Jose State University. It was there, in the heart of Silicon Valley's sprawl, that he spotted the coffee shop on a nondescript corner and imagined something else entirely. Mashayekh and Davoudi became co-owners of not one but two French restaurants in San Jose - Le Papillon and its sister establishment, La Foret.

Scott Cooper was twelve years old when his stepfather opened Le Papillon. He grew up around the restaurant, and in 1992 he joined the staff - starting, as tradition demands, at the bottom. Dishwasher. Bus boy. Prep cook. Pantry. Line cook. Cooper worked nearly every station in the kitchen, learning the restaurant from the tile floors up. He also spent eight years cooking at La Foret, absorbing a second kitchen's rhythms and techniques. Eventually he returned to Le Papillon as Executive Chef, running the kitchen his stepfather had built. The family connections run deep: Cooper's wife is a niece of Davoudi, Mashayekh's original partner and fellow Iranian Army veteran. What began as one immigrant's ambition became a family enterprise woven together by marriage, shared history, and decades of service.

The contrast between Le Papillon's surroundings and its reputation has always been part of its charm. Critics note the prosaic setting - the hotel next door, the strip mall - then describe an interior where customers are pampered by attentive staff in suits. The Zagat Survey's 2010 edition rated Le Papillon 27 out of 30 for both food and service, categories Zagat defines as 'extraordinary to perfection.' Decor scored 23 out of 30, or 'very good to excellent.' Zagat also identified it as one of the top two restaurants in the entire South Bay for service. Five years earlier, the 2005 Zagat Survey had ranked Le Papillon among the Bay Area's top five restaurants outright, giving it the highest marks of any Bay Area restaurant south of San Francisco. The butterfly, it turned out, did not need a beautiful garden to land in.

In April 2010, the Santa Clara County Activists for Animals began weekly street demonstrations outside Le Papillon, protesting the restaurant's use of foie gras. Every week for nearly seven months, activists held signs and spoke with arriving customers, offering literature about the force-feeding of ducks involved in foie gras production. The protests were persistent but civil - no vandalism, no confrontations, just steady presence and conversation. By October 2010, Le Papillon removed foie gras from its menu and informed the activists it would no longer serve the dish. The decision preceded California's own reckoning with the issue: a state law enacted in 2004 banning the production and sale of foie gras did not actually take effect until July 1, 2012, more than a year after Le Papillon had already moved on.