Laravel 5.1 reconfigures malformed symbols from mysql

I am new to laravel framework. I am using Homestead as my development environment and everything is working fine. The problem is that I am inserting Persian records into the mysql database, and when I return them in some views, the Persian charecters become malformed (for example, "آذرشهر" returned as "\ u0622 \ u0630 \ u0631 \ u0634 \ u0647 \ u0631 "). Before using laravel, I had a simillar problem solved with mysqli_set_charset. my old code was as follows:

class MySQLDatabase {
      private  $connection;
      public function __construct(){
            $this->openConnection();
            mysqli_set_charset($this->connection, 'utf8');
      }
      public function openConnection(){
            $this->connection=mysqli_connect(DB_SERVER, DB_USER, DB_PASS, DB_NAME);

            if(mysqli_connect_errno()){
                  die("Database connection failed:" .
                        mysqli_connect_error().
                        "(". mysqli_connect_errno().")"
                  );
            }
      }

      

        
        
        
      

    

My laravel database config file looks like this:

'default' => env('DB_CONNECTION', 'mysql'),
'mysql' => [
            'driver'    => 'mysql',
            'host'      => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
            'database'  => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
            'username'  => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
            'password'  => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
            'charset'   => 'utf8',
            'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
            'prefix'    => '',
            'strict'    => false,
        ],

      

        
        
        
      

    

and the .env file looks like this:

APP_ENV=local
APP_DEBUG=true
APP_KEY=XXXXXXXX

DB_HOST=localhost
DB_DATABASE=homestead
DB_USERNAME=homestead
DB_PASSWORD=secret

CACHE_DRIVER=file
SESSION_DRIVER=file
QUEUE_DRIVER=sync

MAIL_DRIVER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=mailtrap.io
MAIL_PORT=2525
MAIL_USERNAME=null
MAIL_PASSWORD=null
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=null

      

        
        
        
      

    

How can I fix this problem?

This view:

 @extends('app')

    @section('content')
            <h1>شهر</h1>
            @foreach($cities as $city)
            {{ $city }}
            @endforeach
    @stop

      

        
        
        
      

    

and the resulting object looks like this:

{"ID": 402, "city": "\ u0622 \ u0630 \ u0631 \ u0634 \ u0647 \ u0631", "province_id": 1, "created_at": "- 0001-11-30 00:00:00", "updated_at": "0001-11-30 00:00:00"}