Playing Chicken

At the Garlic Festival in Gilroy last week, there was a booth selling garlic chocolate, and another where people lined up for garlic ice cream cones. If you looked around, you could find garlic sushi, which were basically garlic-spiked California rolls, also garlic oysters, garlic linguica , garlic teriyaki, garlic wine, and quesadillas that were stuffed with enough raw, minced garlic to send you staggering a few steps backward.

In a big enclosure near the middle of the festival grounds, dozens of shirtless men, many of them members of the Elks Lodge, whooped and tossed around enormous woks, a couple of feet in diameter, in which they sauteed mountains of garlic vegetables, flotillas of garlic shrimp, a ton or so of garlic squid--as many people stopped to watch the cooking as to eat. A cook-off judge wandered around in his elephant-garlic suit; Miss Gilroy Garlic in her sash; a bearded festival representative in a stunning garlic-bulb gown. The ostensibly garlic-themed entertainment more often than not turned out to be beery versions of “All Right Now” and “Free Bird.” The woman walking around with a big basket of Certs was about the most popular person in Gilroy that day.

Nothing in Gilroy, though, was as severe as the Armenian garlic sauce served at Zankou Chicken--a fierce, blinding-white paste, the texture of pureed horseradish, that scents your car, sears the back of your throat, and whose powerful aroma can stay in your head--also your car--for days. A couple of drops is enough to flavor a hunk of bread, a modest schmear will do for an entire shawarma sandwich. Go ahead, Ultra Brite; go ahead, Lavoris; go ahead, CarFreshner--my money’s on the sauce. It’s also good with chicken.

Everybody knows about the original Zankou, a small, tiled take-out stand in a grimy Hollywood Boulevard mini-mall on Armenian Row, crowded with Armenian teenagers and perfumed by roasting birds. It’s famous for its barbecued chicken sandwich, which is rolled in a pita with tomatoes and enough of the sauce to make a lasting impression on the next few dozen people you meet. Zankou chickens seem to make it onto the buffet at a lot of Hollywood parties.

Now there’s a Zankou in Glendale too, an airy, light-filled restaurant in a new complex near Eagle Rock, decked out with fast-food furniture and decorated with Van Gogh posters, and with stacks of Armenian tabloids. The second Zankou is in a pretty solidly Armenian neighborhood, the kind where the liquor stores sell arak and the corner grocery store sells as much pita as Wonder Bread, and though there’s nothing about the look of the restaurant that suggests Zankou sells anything more exotic than hamburgers or roast turkey, inside you hear as much Armenian spoken as English.

This is what you eat at Zankou: barbecued-chicken sandwiches, excellent falafel, shawarma carved off the rotating spit and served warm, with superbly caramelized edges and sweetly gamy as only properly overcooked lamb can be. There is wonderful mutabbal , a smooth, creamy roasted-eggplant dip, with a sesame top note and a powerful smoky flavor, served with a dusting of spice and a slick of good olive oil. The sesame dip hummus is fine and grainy. And the spit-roasted chickens are superb: golden, crisp-skinned and juicy, with developed chicken flavor, the kind of bird that makes you want to scour the carcass for stray bits of carbonized skin and delicious scraps of flesh, or hoard your favorite bites--that rich chunk of dark meat right where the leg joins the thigh, or that tender strip running along the top. Such chicken really needs no embellishment . . . but a little bit of garlic sauce couldn’t hurt.

Zankou Chicken, 1415 E. Colorado St., Glendale, (818) 244-2237. Open daily, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. No alcohol. Cash only. Lot parking. Dinner for two, food only, $5-$9.