Glendale has one of the largest Armenian populations of any city outside Armenia, and the food that comes with it is spread across several hundred bakeries, kebab houses, groceries and cafes, mostly on a handful of boulevards. Nearly all of it gets described on menus and search results as Mediterranean, which is technically defensible and practically useless - it is a word doing the work of at least four regional traditions that arrived here at different times from Armenia proper, from Lebanon and Syria, from Iran, and from what was western Anatolia. Knowing which one you are standing in front of is the difference between a decent kebab and one of the best meals in the county.
Glendale's Armenian food splits between bakeries you visit in the morning, kebab houses that are an evening event, and groceries that are neither. Tell Karpo what you are after and what time it is, and it will point you at the right kind of room rather than the highest-rated one.
Four traditions under one word
Armenian cooking in Glendale carries the marks of where each wave came from. The Lebanese and Syrian Armenian tradition brings mezze, heavy use of pomegranate molasses, muhammara and a lighter grilling style. The Iranian Armenian one brings rice - long-grain, buttered, with a crisp tahdig crust - and stews. The cooking from Armenia itself is more focused on preserved and cured things, dairy, and bread.
This is why two restaurants a block apart with almost identical descriptions serve genuinely different food. The names on the menu overlap; the execution does not.
Lahmajoun is the entry point
The single dish to start with is lahmajoun: a very thin round of dough spread with finely minced lamb, tomato, pepper and spice, baked hot and fast until the edges crisp. It comes out flexible rather than crunchy, you squeeze lemon over it, add parsley, roll it, and eat it in about ninety seconds.
It is sold from bakeries by the piece for a couple of dollars, which makes it the cheapest possible way to compare kitchens. Buying one from three different bakeries in an afternoon is a real education and costs less than a sandwich.
The bakery is a different business from the restaurant
Armenian bakeries in Glendale are morning-to-afternoon operations selling lahmajoun, boereg, cheese and spinach pastries, sesame-crusted breads and a case of sweets. They are counters, not dining rooms, and most of the trade is taken away.
The kebab houses are the evening business: charcoal grills, mezze to start, rice and grilled meat as the centre, and long tables. Turning up at a bakery at eight in the evening or a kebab house at nine in the morning is the most common way visitors miss the point of the neighbourhood.
What to order at a kebab house
The mixed grill is the default and it is usually the right answer for a table - lule, shish, chicken, sometimes lamb chops, with grilled tomato and pepper and a pile of rice or bread. What people under-order is the mezze: hummus, muhammara, mutabbal, tabbouleh, stuffed vine leaves, and a plate of raw vegetables and herbs that arrives whether you ask or not.
Order the mezze properly and less meat. The grill is competent almost everywhere in Glendale; the small plates are where the individual kitchen actually shows itself. Raffi's Place and Carousel are the two long-standing rooms most people are sent to and both reward this approach.
Groceries, sujuk and what to take home
The Armenian groceries are worth a stop even if you have just eaten. The cured meats counter is the reason: sujuk, a firm spiced sausage, and basturma, air-dried beef coated in a thick fenugreek paste, sliced paper-thin and eaten with bread and eggs.
Alongside those, the dairy counter carries string cheese braided with nigella seed, thick strained yogurt and a range of pickles. A bag from one of these shops is a week of very good breakfasts for the price of one restaurant meal.
Why Glendale and not somewhere else
The concentration is not accidental. Armenian settlement in Glendale built through the 1970s and accelerated sharply after the 1988 earthquake and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and by the 2000s roughly a third of the city's population was Armenian - among the highest concentrations anywhere in the diaspora.
A community that size supports specialist businesses that a scattered one cannot: a bakery that only makes bread, a shop that only cures meat, a place that sells one kind of pastry. That density is the whole reason the food here is better than Armenian food almost anywhere else in the United States.
Sweet, coffee and the afternoon
The pastry tradition here overlaps with the Turkish and Levantine ones and diverges in the details - baklava cut in different shapes, nutmeg and clove where you expect cinnamon, and gata, a layered sweet bread with a buttery flour filling that is closer to a scone than a pastry.
Coffee is served in the small unfiltered style, boiled with the grounds, sweetened at the point of making rather than after. If you are asked how you want it, the answer is a level of sweetness, not a size.
Where in Glendale, and getting there
The density runs along the main boulevards - Glendale Avenue, Central, Broadway and the streets around them - with a further concentration heading east towards the 2 freeway. It is not a single walkable strip; it is a city's worth of businesses spread over several miles.
That means driving, mostly, and Glendale is one of the easier parts of the county for it - wide streets, structured parking, and lots at most of the larger restaurants. From central Los Angeles it is fifteen to twenty-five minutes outside rush hour.
Tags: #MediterraneanFoodNearMe #Glendale #LosAngeles #ArmenianFood #Lahmajoun #HiddenGems #Kebab #LAFood #Basturma #LAEats
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Ask Karpo first
Glendale's Armenian food is filed under a word that explains none of it. Ask Karpo which room near you does the version you actually want.
