The Only Really Big Cheese in Hollywood

Karoun Dairy could be anywhere in the Mediterranean. Its tiny shop front is spartan and squeaky clean. What its small stock of dry goods might lack in selection, it makes up for in potency. There are serried bottles of cherry syrup and rose water and concentrated slabs of apricot paste. Gallon cans of cooking-grade olive oil are set out on the floor. A refrigerator case holds yogurt drinks and shrink-wrapped white-white cheeses with names like Touma and feta. A woman with eye makeup to rival Cleopatra minds the cash register.

But the shop is not in Beirut or Nicosia, Cyprus, or any of the places where it looks as if it should be. It’s in Hollywood, and to owner Anto Baghdassarian, as he gestures toward the refrigerator case containing rounds of feta and tightly wound wads of string cheese, “All this is the American dream.”

Baghdassarian is ebullient. Three of his cheeses have just received awards at the American Cheese Society’s 18th annual convention in Louisville, Ky. They won another bundle of medals at the California State Fair this year. The business he started 11 years ago with his wife and one worker, which he steered through the L.A. riots, now employs 55 people and produces 15,000 pounds of cheese a week in Los Angeles and 45,000 more from a new plant in Turlock in the Central Valley.

From his original notion of selling Middle Eastern-style string cheese to immigrant communities, his business has grown to supply major food chains and make several types of feta, aged cow’s milk cheese, yogurt, sour creams and cultured cream cheese as well.

Baghdassarian brought his family to the U.S. from Lebanon in 1990, but he describes himself as Armenian rather than Lebanese. The Armenian diaspora after World War I propelled many Armenians to the Middle East, he says. His father arrived in Lebanon in 1928. “Villagers felt sorry for him and taught him how to make yogurt and cheese,” he says. His father went on to start his own plant and become the first dairyman in the Middle East to practice pasteurization, says Baghdassarian.

At his father’s behest, Baghdassarian studied dairy technology, first in Lebanon, then in Denmark under a U.N. scholarship. “I learned how to make European cheeses, like Havarti and Gouda,” he says. Upon his return to Lebanon, his family started a new plant, but after 15 years of civil war there, Baghdassarian took his family to Los Angeles, where all three of his children attended UCLA. (His excited spiel slows to ensure that all his children’s qualifications are fully noted: His oldest son, Ohan, is a physicist; his daughter, Talar, is about to receive a PhD in pharmacy; and his youngest son, Rostom, has a business degree and has joined the dairy.)

While it is fashionable to put down California these days, Baghdassarian is an unabashed booster. California’s standards for milk productions are, he says, the toughest, the “most avant-garde” in the world. What he says he brought to the mix were Old World recipes.

The first type of cheese he chose to make, he says, was string cheese. American string cheese, he observed, was mainly mozzarella-based. He didn’t care for it. He chose instead a strong, Middle Eastern-style curd with a salty, lactic punch.

Then, rather than sell it in individually wrapped tubes, he chose to sell knotted bundles. To serve these, he says, you remove the packaging and just loosen the strands. The tassels easily spill open. He quickly slits open a pack, yanks them apart, and sure enough, they do.

“It makes like angel hairs,” he says. “At parties, each person takes a piece. It’s a novelty. It’s fun.” After a pause, he adds, “It also melts well in sandwiches.”

The Karoun string cheese took a second prize at the American Cheese Society Awards this year. The brace of gold medals went to their cow’s milk feta and labneh (which Karoun spells labne ). They make four different types of feta, explains Baghdassarian. One is goat’s milk; the cow’s milk ones vary in sharpness from mild through semi-sharp to sharp. The sharp cow’s milk version was the winner at the national show.

By contrast, the labneh is mild; it’s the kind of thing one might find served as a dip, studded with chives. It is made using live yogurt cultures. “People are no more using cream cheese as a spread,” says Baghdassarian as he rips off the top of a tub and offers a spoonful. “They’re using this.”

While the Baghdassarians started making cheese in L.A., they say, they “followed the milk” to the Central Valley when dairy farms started moving north. At first, they were making cheese in borrowed premises. “My father was using other people’s facilities,” Rostom says. “We couldn’t control the conditions.” Three years ago, they opened their own plant. “The shelf life of the cheese increased, the taste improved, the quality, everything improved,” he says.

The result has surprised even the Baghdassarians. Cheeses they devised to sell in ethnic mom-and-pop stores are being sold in major chains, including Jons Markets, Costco, Whole Foods, Bristol Farms, the Glendale branch of Albertson’s and Mother’s markets in Orange County.

And now they are also carrying off top prizes at national cheese shows. To them, it is the American dream, all right. But to the local government, it’s Armenian enterprise. Hollywood recently put up signs around Baghdassarian’s patch of Santa Monica Boulevard dubbing it “Little Armenia.”

The California Milk Advisory Board has credited the Karoun cheeses with an even more exotic provenance. It mistakenly linked the dairy’s name to the Web site of a cheese factory in Lebanon. This has a home with a cartoon Holstein cow that says, “Show me the yogurt.”

Luckily this dairy is run by Baghdassarian’s brother. “They keep getting e-mails, but they just send back the orders to Los Angeles,” Rostom says.

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Karoun Dairies, 5117 Santa Monica Blvd., between Ardmore and Normandie avenues. (323) 666-6222. Open Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. https://www.karouncheese.com.