If you felt like having Armenian food...

If you felt like having Armenian food 20 years ago, you probably headed to Pasadena. There was a cluster of Armenian restaurants with names like Kabakian’s, Sayat Nova and Gypsy.

They served the familiar eastern Mediterranean cuisine: hummus, tabbouleh, stuffed grape leaves, baklava. Often a dash of red pepper on the shish kebab was the only tip-off that you weren’t eating in a Lebanese restaurant.

They were run by western Armenians, descendants of refugees from the early 20th century massacres in what is now western Turkey. Their cuisine had a lot in common with Syrian and Lebanese food to begin with. On top of that, most western Armenian families had lived in Syria or Lebanon for a generation or more before coming to this country.

Beginning in the late ‘80s, there was a new influx of Armenian immigrants to Southern California, and many settled in Glendale. These days Colorado Street is crowded with Armenian businesses from Glendale Avenue to Verdugo Road, and so is Glendale Avenue between Colorado and Los Feliz Road. There’s another cluster on Central Avenue near St. Mary’s Armenian Apostolic Church.

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This is our new capital of Armenian cuisine. It’s home to 11 Armenian restaurants of one description or another, six retail bakeries (more, if you count a wholesale Armenian bakery and several Armenian-run French bakeries), five banquet halls for private parties and more Armenian delis and markets than you can shake a stick at.

The Armenian presence is so strong in the neighborhood that other Middle Eastern food businesses reach out to Armenian customers. Baklawa Palace, at 801 S. Glendale Ave., is Lebanese-owned, but its signage carefully mentions Armenian pastries among the attractions. Andre’s Restaurant, at 1321 E. Colorado St., Unit E, is an Armenian-owned Persian restaurant, complete with romantic Persian murals on the walls and ghormeh sabzi on the menu, but it does offers an Armenian pork kebab (left decently untranslated on the Persian side of the menu).

Most of the newcomers came from the former Republic of Armenia or neighboring Georgia or Azerbaijan, and their cuisine is more like Persian than Lebanese. Kebabs always come with a grilled tomato, a grilled pepper and a huge mound of rice, usually topped with some grains colored yellow or orange with saffron or turmeric. What always makes it clear you’re eating in an Armenian and not a Persian restaurant is the use of pork, which Muslims are forbidden to eat. Some of these places also offer dishes from the Caucasus, such as the Georgian cheese bread khachapuri or the sack-shaped meat ravioli called khinkal.

So this is not entirely the Armenian cuisine Angelenos are familiar with. A number of restaurants in the neighborhood (and all the bakeries) are in the familiar Lebanese-like mode, and there’s a certain amount of fusion between the western and eastern styles, but be prepared: Most Glendale Armenian restaurants give you swatches of lavash bread rather than pita and some don’t even bother to serve tabbouleh.

With three tables and eight chairs, Mini Kabob comes by its name honestly (it offers takeout and delivers in the neighborhood). It’s also rather inconspicuous, just off Central Avenue, and hasn’t much decor except a wall clock shaped like a wristwatch. But the menu is larger than you’d expect and includes chicken schnitzel, chicken Kiev and quail, as well as the usual beef, lamb, chicken and pork kebabs. The red meat items have a dash of sweet spices; from their tenderness and tang, it seems the chicken kebabs have been marinated in yogurt. Kebabs come with hummus and salad as well as rice or fries, grilled tomato and grilled pepper (here a jalapeno).

Right across Central, Kabob Land also looks like a humble place--from the outside. Inside, it’s decorated like a French restaurant, complete with a print of the Arc de Triomphe in a gilt frame, though you’ll hear way more of the muscular, deliberate rhythms of Armenian here than of French. The menu is cosmopolitan: Persian and Lebanese salads and appetizers, Greek gyros, a Russian meat and sour cream salad, barbecued sturgeon, khinkal (here spelled khingali; $1 apiece, six to an order) and a beef heart and liver kebab. The Armenian yogurt soup sepas (accent on the second syllable), enriched with a little barley and flavored with mint and cilantro, is equally good hot and cold. The meaty kebabs have a subtle, faintly peppery marinade.

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Next door is Panos Pastry, a branch of the famous Panos in Hollywood that was originally established in Beirut in 1951. It makes high-quality baklava and similar pastries, but here the emphasis is on a huge variety of cakes and petits fours.

Most people who drive past Red Top Burger must think it just sells hamburgers--and pizza, if they notice the sign that mentions pizza. But it also serves Italian sandwiches, pasta dishes, Mexican food and Thai food, and the front window lists Armenian pork, chicken, luleh and mini-kebabs. The kebabs (which also include pork rib tips and liver) have the poetic Persian marinade of onion juice and saffron and come with cabbage as well as grilled tomato and Anaheim pepper. And then there’s ajarski khajapuri, a sort of cheese tart hailing from Adzhari in western Georgia. It’s made by folding pizza dough into an oval and topping it with cheese; as it’s removed from the oven, a couple of eggs are broken on it to cook sunny-side up in the heat of the pie. You can also ask to have your khachapuri topped with tomatoes and mushrooms, which make it a bit more like a pizza.

Over on Glendale Avenue, Moon Mart Kabab is one of the Armenian places that might pass for a Persian chelo kebab joint if it weren’t for the pork chops on the menu. The yellow-orange rice grains sprinkled on top of the rice are aromatic with saffron. The chicken kebab has a good chicken flavor and everybody gets a plain salad of chopped tomato and cucumber as well as the rice and grilled vegetables.

It’s hard to say exactly what’s Greek about Elena’s Greek and Armenian Cuisine. It does have gyros, but that sort of kebab sliced from a vertical spit is not unknown in Armenian (or Lebanese) cuisine, and neither are stuffed grape leaves. Maybe it’s just the copies of classical statuary that adorn this otherwise plain, institutional-green room. The food is quite good--the luleh kebab rather spicy, the beef kebab very tender. You get a little plate of pickled cabbage along with the usual rice and grilled vegetables.

From the nostalgic photos of Beirut on the walls, you know the menu at Varouj’s Kabobs will be totally in the Lebanese style, complete with yogurt cheese (lebneh), arayes (a sandwich of beef and pine nuts grilled on pita), the sausages ma’ani and soujouk and the meat and bulgur mixture kibbeh, here called by its Armenian name, kuefta (as usual, the kibbeh is either deep-fried as meatballs or served raw as chi kuefta, a sort of kibbeh tartare). The kebabs are available as platters (with pita, hummus and tabbouleh) or sandwiches. Varouj’s tabbouleh is worthy of note; it’s the light, parsley-dominated sort of salad that first made tabbouleh popular, not the sludgy thing tabbouleh has become in health-food restaurants.

Right across the street is Sarkis Plaza, home of the wildly popular Sarkis Pastry, which has opened branches in Pasadena and Anaheim. It too has Lebanese roots--the original Sarkis is in Bourj Hammoud, an Armenian neighborhood in Beirut. Like most of the bakeries in the neighborhood, it makes a wide variety of French pastries, but its Middle Eastern pastries are exceptionally good. The baklavas are delicate and crisp, never soggy with too much syrup. Some are as small as half the size of the familiar Greek baklava, which is also the Lebanese preference in baklava.

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Al Wazir Chicken has ambitions above its lunch-counter setting. There are flowers on the tables and instrumental ballads on the soundtrack, and it sells much more than chicken. Besides kebabs, it offers gyros (swarma), grilled quail, lamb tongue sandwich, khinkal, Persian salads, lebneh (lepni), hummus and tabbouleh, eggplant caviar (igra) and American sandwiches. The chicken kebab is one to be proud of, though, very tender with an elusive secret marinade that might contain soy. Kebabs come with rice, grilled tomato and pepper, an herb-heavy cabbage salad and pita bread. Chicken kebab also comes with a grainy garlic sauce.

Colorado Street is the home of bakeries. Flor de Cafe has signs reading “sweet shop” and “baker” in Persian and Yeznik Tamazyan, the name of its owner, but it does cater to a Latino clientele as well. You can find Mexican cookies and pan dulces next to Persian bamyeh and zulabiya fritters. It’s a huge operation, making French and Armenian pastries of all kinds and Armenian breads such as lavash and the thicker sweet flatbread gata. On top of everything else, it sells a variety of imported Russian candies and sweets.

You can get pizza and submarine sandwiches at Bingo Pizza, and also the usual Armenian kebabs, which are sprinkled with sour ground sumac berry. With your kebab plate, you choose a Mexican, Armenian or Russian soft drink from a cold box. This place also makes a khachapuri topped with eggs, but without optional toppings.

Abraham Bakery and Cafe makes baklava, Armenian breads and cookies, also French cakes, tarts, petits fours and filled wafers. You can also get cold-cut sandwiches, which is what makes this tiny place a cafe.

The third of Glendale’s pizza-Armenian kebab places is Pizza Boy, situated between the Persian restaurant Andre’s and Mako’s, a wholesale Armenian bakery.

Kermanig Bakery is emphatically western Armenian; the walls are covered with ancient photos of Armenian resistance fighters of the early 20th century. The original Kermanig opened in Beirut in 1949. The founder’s son immigrated to the U.S. in 1974 and opened the new Kermanig in 1987. It’s apparently the only one of these bakeries to make the “Armenian pizza” lahmajoun as well as baklava-type pastries and Armenian breads. It has a thriving retail business--some customers show up before the doors open to get bread fresh from the oven--but it’s also a major wholesale bakery with 42 delivery trucks serving Southern and Central California.

If any Armenian restaurant is a known quantity in L.A., it’s Zankou Chicken. The Glendale branch specializes, like the others, in grilled chicken served with pita, hummus and a highly garlicky mayonnaise.

That gleaming glamorous pastry shop next to Zankou is Baklava Factory, which also has a branch in Encino. Here the balance is a little more toward baklava in all its varieties, but there are French pastries as well.

Situated apart from the rest of the Armenian hot spots, Palmer International Cuisine is in historic Adams Square, a quiet, charming little corner of Glendale, which was once a town of its own by the name of Tropico; Baskin-Robbins opened its first shop here. Palmer International is a another tiny place with just three tables, though a bit more spacious than Mini Kabob. The usual kebabs are on tap here, and also quail, a range of soups (lentil, yogurt, borscht). You get hummus with your kebab but a sumac and onion salad instead of tabbouleh. The mysterious tetu on the menu, by the way, is tart pickled vegetables.

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Glendale Guide

1. Mini Kabob, 3131/2 W. Vine St., (818) 244-1343. 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday-Tuesday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday.

2. Kabob Land, 416 S. Central Ave., (818) 500-3962. 10 a.m.-11 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday.

3. Panos Pastry, 418 S. Central Ave., (818) 502-0549. 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 9 a.m.-8 p.m. Sunday.

4. Red Top Burger, 501 S. Central Ave., (818) 500-0301; 500-1376. 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. daily.

5. Moon Mart Kabab, 400 S. Glendale Ave., (818) 241-2314. 10 a.m.-10 p.m. daily.

6. Elena’s Greek and Armenian Cuisine, 1000 S. Glendale Ave., (818) 241-5730. 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Saturday.

7. Varouj’s Kabobs, 1110 S. Glendale Ave., (818) 243-9870. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, noon-8 p.m. Sunday.

8. Sarkis Pastry, 1111 S. Glendale Ave., (818) 956-6636. 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 8 a.m.-8 p.m. Sunday.

9. Al Wazir Chicken, 1219 S. Glendale Ave., (818) 500-1578. 10 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday.

10. Flor de Cafe, 537 E. Colorado St., (818) 543-1401. 7 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 7 a.m.-8:30 Sunday.

11. Bingo Pizza, 627 E. Colorado St., (818) 552-2525. 11 a.m.-11 p.m. daily.

12. Abraham Bakery and Cafe, 1014 E. Colorado St., (818) 500-1499. 7 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 7 a.m.-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 7 a.m.-8 p.m. Sunday.

13. Pizza Boy, #B, 1321 E. Colorado St., (818) 247-5555. 11 a.m.-10 p.m. daily.

14. Kermanig Bakery, 1371 E. Colorado St., (818) 246-2750. 7 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Saturday.

15. Zankou Chicken, #D, 1415 E. Colorado St., (818) 244-1937. 10 a.m.-11 p.m. daily.

16. Baklava Factory, #K-L, 1415 E. Colorado St., (818) 548-7070. 8:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. daily.

17. Palmer International Cuisine, 1022 E. Palmer Ave., (818) 241-1342. 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

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More Authentic Ethnic

* Find our earlier look at eating in Koreatown at www.calendarlive.com/authentic.