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 \u2014 or maybe three or four of them, for every person in a group.<\/p>\n
In Levantine Arabic, the dish is known as lahm bi ajeen: literally, \u201cmeat with dough.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re 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\u2019s center. Spritzing juice over the surface cuts the concentrated meatiness. Plenty of customers request extra citrus.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re keeping the place busy.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s long and intricate history.<\/p>\n
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Lahmajo goes into the oven. Fresh baked lahmajo and Megrelakan khachapuri. (Ron De Angelis \/ For The Times) <\/p>\n
To stick with the bready theme a little longer: A single variation of lahmajo is available, shellacked with cheese. But hedonistically cheesy khachapuris \u2014 specialties of the Republic of Georgia, bordering Armenia to the north \u2014 yank my attention away.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Fish Khashlama sits at the center of a spread of dishes.<\/p>\n (Ron De Angelis \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n 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. \u201cTun\u201d is Armenian for \u201chome.\u201d) 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.<\/p>\n L.A.\u2019s best Armenian restaurants tend to excel at one forte: the exquisite marinated and charcoal-grilled meats at Mini Kabob<\/a>; the mulchy pleasures of the greens-filled flatbread at namesake Zhengyalov Hatz<\/a>; the cured beef, stingingly spiced, packed into sandwiches at Sahag\u2019s Basturma<\/a>. 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mary Janibekyan and Arsen Sardaryan with their son Vahagn, part of the family behind Tun Lahmajo.<\/p>\n (Ron De Angelis \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n Very few local places delve into the regionally specific Armenian repertoire \u2014 what Janibekyan\u2019s son Vladislav defined in an interview as \u201cCaucasian cuisine,\u201d referring to the geographic area located between the Black and Caspian seas broadly defined as the Caucasus.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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