Hoist up half of Arthur Grigoryan’s basturma brisket sandwich for a first bite, and stare for a moment into the mouth of the beast.
You’ll need a firm grip to handle the stretched edges of fluffy pita, thick enough to discern a labyrinth of air pockets around the borders. Inside the gaping maw: blocks of tongue-red pastrami, rubbed with chaimen (a fenugreek-forward spice rub, also flecked with cumin, garlic and chiles) used to season jerky-adjacent, air-dried Armenian basturma, cured for two weeks and then smoked for12 hours. The result, beyond beefy intensity, is several textures at once: flaky, taut, buttery.
Chef-owner Arthur Grigoryan takes a puffy, char-spotted pita out of his outdoor stove at Yerord Mas.
Dripping with Gruyère-laced Mornay sauce, this thing is phenomenal, a statement piece of excess and engineering that’s gone viral on social media several times over the near-decade the chef has been refining its form via pop-ups and ghost kitchens.
If the walloping sandwich is the lure that leads you to the tiny Glendale restaurant Grigoryan opened at last with his wife Takouhi Petrosyan in January, it will have done its job.
But order even one other dish from the concise menu — a whirled dip, a crisp salad wafting lemon and mint, a color-wheel spin on vegetarian kyuftah — and you’ll realize he’s up to far more than cleverly revised deli foods.
L.A. has never seen an Armenian restaurant like Yerord Mas before.
This is a second-generation son of the city expressing the cooking of his people: clear-cut and personal, shaped by family stories while also informed by academic-level research, a link between there and here, then and now, a puzzle piece in our dining culture snapping perfectly into place. And housed in a former doughnut shop, no less.
Los Angeles is home to the largest Armenian diaspora population outside of Armenia; our Armenian-run restaurants embody the breadth of the community’s culinary prowess and the depth of experiences. Conversations around excellent kebabs in Southern California tend to begin with the Martirosyan family and their Mini Kabob in Glendale. Institutions like Carousel, serving some of the deeper cuts of a Lebanese mezze repertoire, and Falafel Arax, with its namesake signature, trace back to specialties adopted by displaced families who fled the Armenian genocide after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Tun Lahmajo in Burbank takes its name from Armenia’s national flatbread, with a menu that also delves into homestyle roasts and herb stews and a range of terrific khachapuris.
Amid this wealth, Yerord Mas flows into the lineage of other small, plucky projects that have helped define and redefine cuisines essential to Los Angeles. I’m reminded of closed-but-not-forgotten exemplars such as Wes Avila’s Guerrilla Tacos and Charles Olalia’s Filipino counter Ricebar, as well as current innovators like banchan whiz Jihee Kim’s Perilla LA and Cody Ma and Misha Sesar’s stellar Persian cafe Azizam.
Margat samak fish curry prepared with barramundi alongside dishes including pistachio hummus, vegetarian kyuftah and brisket basturma sandwich.
Scoop into Grigoryan’s hummus to see what I mean.
His grandmother on his father’s side was raised in Kayseri, Turkey, once an epicenter of Armenian life. In the wake of the 1915 genocide, her family relocated to Egypt. Aligning the influences that seeped into her cooking, Grigoryan tweaks a recipe for pistachio-laced hummus he found reading “Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table: A Fourteenth-Century Egyptian Cookbook,” translated by historian Nawal Nasrallah. Blending the nuts with chickpeas initially turned out grainy, so he pulverized the pistachios in a Vitamix to match the consistency of tahini — which he also uses in the dip along with the usual garlic and lemon juice and flickers of cumin and the Lebanese Syrian spice blend baharat.
It registers as familiar in its earthy smoothness, and novel in its subtle spicy sweetness, and altogether delicious. Grigoryan often stands at the side of the restaurant’s building, baking pita to order in a portable oven. Because of his relatives’ diaspora experiences, he ate more pita as a child than Armenia’s crackery staple lavash. Straight from the heat, this is bread as hot air balloon, and it hits even more sensorially as a hummus vehicle rather than sandwich vessel.
Every dish on the concise, seasonally evolving menu is like this: a pleasure in its own context, but also a branch on the family tree, which Grigoryan will happily detail if you ask.
The walloping sandwich might lead you to the tiny restaurant that Arthur Grigoryn and his wife, Takouhi Petrosyan, opened in January in Glendale. Order at the counter from a seasonally evolving menu where every dish is a pleasure.
His brother’s in-laws are Iraqi, so an Iraqi fish curry finds its way into the repertoire, glossing barramundi filet in a silken spiced tomato sauce gently soured with tamarind.
Its Euro-style presentation specifically hints at his culinary background. Grigoryan had been raised in Los Angeles before attending Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. After graduation, he stayed for a couple years in the city, cooking at fine-dining institution Drouant before returning to Southern California and landing in Nancy Silverton’s Mozza kitchens.
During a visit to Austin, Texas, in 2017, he had an epiphany at a well-trafficked pilgrimage site, Franklin Barbecue. The bliss of Aaron Franklin’s post-oak-perfumed brisket led him to imagine what this wobbling meat might be like crossed with the basturma his Armenian family fed him his whole life.
Yerord Mas
6800 San Fernando Road, Glendale, (747) 283-1017, yerordmas.toast.site
Prices: Dips and salads $12-$21, meat and vetegarian kuftehs $12-$23, entrees $27-$33, sandwiches $24-$38.
Details: Open 5 to 10 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday
What to drink: No alcohol, but there’s a fun selection of sodas.
Recommended dishes: basturma brisket sandwich, pistachio hummus, fattoush, chi kufteh, butter kufteh, margat samak (fish curry).
The Texas trip urged him toward entrepreneurism. He initially called his pop-up “III Mas BBQ,” the name referring to the Third District neighborhood in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. His father had grown up there. In an interview, Grigoryan mentioned that his dad had worked in a Yerevan processing plant for cured meats similar to RC Provisions in Burbank, the company that, among many clients, supplies the legendary pastrami to Langer’s Deli.
I should probably mention that in its current restaurant iteration, the basturma brisket sandwich is $38. Grigoryan uses Australian wagyu from a company that emphasizes sustainable farming practices. I don’t care about often-too-unctuous wagyu as a luxury signifier, but the sublime qualities achieved here speak for themselves. The sandwich could easily be enough for two people, and a cherrywood-smoked pork variation zapped with toum, shatta, shishito peppers and sumac-speckled onions is a near equal and costs $24.
Chef-owner Arthur Grigoryan with his pita. Options for spiced kyuftah include lentil, beef tartare and bulgur. (Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)
Ironically, the fame of the sandwich also over-deemphasizes the restaurant’s wealth of vegetarian options. He makes two meat-free versions of kyuftah, lentils or bulgur magnified with fresh herbs and dusky spices and patted into oval shapes surrounded by fresh vegetables. Alongside a crisp, gorgeous fattoush and hummus, or muhammara twanging with pomegranate molasses, animal protein is little missed.
Discover all this in what is admittedly a quirky setting. Yerord Mas’ building, still looking very much like the Faster Donuts it once housed, floats in the center of a quiet strip mall on a commercial stretch at the edge of Burbank. Jane Choi — whom longtime Angelenos might recognize from her days as manager at Canelé, a neighborhood gem that closed in Atwater Village a decade ago — does her utmost to infuse the five-table dining room with her bustling sense of grace.
Besides, we’re in Los Angeles. We know how marvels manifest in strip malls. This is one of them.