The primary draw at Tun Lahmajo, a restaurant in Burbank lined with grainy woods to resemble a summer cabin, is right there in the name. A mottled, golden-edged lahmajo lands on nearly every table — or maybe three or four of them, for every person in a group.
In Levantine Arabic, the dish is known as lahm bi ajeen: literally, “meat with dough.” Armenians shortened the phrase and adapted the flatbread as their own. Cooks at Tun Lahmajo stretch their floury palette nearly as thin as a water cracker, though the flavor has far more char and tang. Cooks smear on a silky-rough mixture of seasoned beef and tomato paste right to the brim, which often handsomely buckles in the heat of baking.
They might arrive oval, or rounder, or somewhere oblong and in between. Their unpredictable beauty is a reminder that an actual human someone is in the kitchen shaping them. Always, a server rushes them straight from the oven, when they’re at once crisp and bendy, on plates where the crusty circumference hangs just over the rim. A squarish wedge of lemon has been dropped on the lahmajo’s center. Spritzing juice over the surface cuts the concentrated meatiness. Plenty of customers request extra citrus.
I could stop here, and it would suffice as a recommendation. The signature at Tun Lahmajo, consistent and excellent, has already been embraced by the Armenian community of Los Angeles, the largest diaspora population outside of Armenia. They’re keeping the place busy.
In the months since the restaurant opened last summer, though, the menu has kept expanding, to the point that it can be approached two ways: as a roster of comfort foods, and as a doorway into one cuisine’s long and intricate history.
Lahmajo goes into the oven. Fresh baked lahmajo and Megrelakan khachapuri. (Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
To stick with the bready theme a little longer: A single variation of lahmajo is available, shellacked with cheese. But hedonistically cheesy khachapuris — specialties of the Republic of Georgia, bordering Armenia to the north — yank my attention away.
Adjarian khachapuri, the version tapered on the ends to resemble a canoe, will be remembered by food obsessives for its moment at the end of last decade. Cheese fills its hull; after baking, the cook cracks over an egg or two with pats of butter to exaggerate the richness. Combine it all with a spoon and voila: molten dip in a bread bowl.
To make the puffed Megrelakan (sometimes called Megrelian) khachapuri, eggs and butter are folded into stretchy, grated sulguni cheese before cooking. This one is the jewel. Servers carry it wobbling through the dining room, deflating like a souffle, and then they carve it into sixths at the table using a pizza wheel. Hot and irresistible, the texture is billowy, offset by the crisp, blistered fringes. As the speckled pie cools and its ingredients settle and condense, an appealing salty-sharpness becomes more overt.
Fish Khashlama sits at the center of a spread of dishes.
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Savory breads have been the focus from the beginning, when Eduard Janibekyan and his family opened the first Tun Lahmajo in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, in 2008. (The restaurant space had originally been their ground-floor apartment. “Tun” is Armenian for “home.”) As the business found its rhythms, the Janibekyans had the bandwidth to add broader categories of homestyle dishes: cold salads, roasted meats, a range of soups and herbed stews. They mirrored the process, sped up, at their Burbank location.
L.A.’s best Armenian restaurants tend to excel at one forte: the exquisite marinated and charcoal-grilled meats at Mini Kabob; the mulchy pleasures of the greens-filled flatbread at namesake Zhengyalov Hatz; the cured beef, stingingly spiced, packed into sandwiches at Sahag’s Basturma. That, or they serve Lebanese-Armenian menus that trace back to the longstanding diaspora community in Beirut. Currently, the finest among our Lebanese-Armenian institutions is the Hollywood outpost of Carousel.
Mary Janibekyan and Arsen Sardaryan with their son Vahagn, part of the family behind Tun Lahmajo.
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Very few local places delve into the regionally specific Armenian repertoire — what Janibekyan’s son Vladislav defined in an interview as “Caucasian cuisine,” referring to the geographic area located between the Black and Caspian seas broadly defined as the Caucasus.
Sorting the roots of Armenian food must take into account the aftermath of the genocidal killing of more than 1 million Armenians starting in 1915, and the nearly 70 years under the Soviet regime that closely followed and ended in 1991. The landlocked country, bordering Turkey and Iran to the west, has been a fought-over juncture for millenniums.
“Cultural and gastronomic exchange has been part and parcel of this region for ages … Armenians do not have a national cuisine in the same sense as nationalities that possessed a long history of statehood and well-defined frontiers,” wrote Irina Petrosian and David Underwood in their 2006 book, “Armenian Food: Fact, Fiction & Folklore.” For the example of lahmajo, the authors pointed to repatriated Armenians in the 1960s returning from the Syrian city of Aleppo as the ones who introduced the dish to Yerevan.
How does all this complex history inform a meal in Burbank?
1. Tun Lahmajo has already been embraced by the Armenian community of Los Angeles, the largest diaspora population outside of Armenia. (Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Order a starter of strained yogurt, its density somewhere between mascarpone and cream cheese, to dollop over ripped hunks of lahmajo and bring silkiness to meats like lamb ribs roasted in the oven. I love the way qrchick, a ruddy soup jolted with pickled cabbage, slashes the richness of the khachapuris.
A dish of mildly spiced, sautéed beef and potatoes, both cut into strips, has been made by Armenian cooks for so long that no one can quite pinpoint the origin of its nickname. It’s called “ker u sus,” which colloquially translates as “shut up and eat.” If the combination doesn’t directly stoke your nostalgia, your inquisitive palate may be more stirred by ostri, garlicky spiced beef infused with dried red chiles and fenugreek. Avelouk, a tangle of wild sorrel served cool and garnished with crushed walnuts, brings a welcome infusion of green to the mix.
Khashlama is a category of brothy stews. An elemental variation made with lamb teeters on bland, but the generously sized fish khashlama is a summery joy, brought out in a pot with hunks of trout (watch for bones), peeled potatoes and whole peppers, and heaped with dill, parsley and other feathery herbs.
Avelouk is served cool with a tangle of wild sorrel served cool and garnished with crushed walnuts.
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
If you can pace your lunch or dinner with leisure, ask for the traditional and endearingly universal chmur: Russets roasted in the oven for 40 minutes and then smooshed tableside, along with plenty of butter, by a server wielding a wooden masher.
I could race you down other rabbit holes, including the Levantine shades of kebabs, shawarma, ishli (known elsewhere as kibbeh) and a bulghur-heavy riff on tabbouleh, or borscht and oil-glossed, Uzbekistani-style pilaf to swerve into Soviet-era holdovers. The menu is daunting, and against the many other highlights these choices each rate as fine enough.
Probably there will be little room for dessert, but I must point out the gata, a round pastry-cake hybrid served warm that hides an almost custardy layer just under the top crust. One could debate empires and authenticity over a spread at Tun Lahmajo, or take its soulful cooking at face value, but in the end a standout meal concludes as it should begin: with a bronzed thing of beauty pulled hot from the oven.
Tun Lahmajo
2202 N. Glenoaks Blvd., Burbank, (626) 553-8717, instagram.com/tunlahmajo.usa
Prices: savory Armenian flatbreads and cheesy breads $6.80 to $25, soups $12 to $14, salads $9 to $15, meats and stews $23 to $39, desserts $7 to $18.
Details: Open daily, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. No alcohol (but try the herbal “Armenian bouquet” tea). Lot and street parking.
Recommended dishes: lahmajo, Megrelakan khachapuri, fish khashlama, ostri (spiced beef), strained yogurt, aveolouk (greens with walnut and pomegranate), gata (sweet pastry-cake hybrid).
A diorama of the Janibekyan family home in Armenia is perched in a nook on the wall at Tun Lahmajo.
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)