June in Retrospect
the month in meals in Armenia and Boston + Armenian wines!
hello! welcome to the monthly retrospect, where I share what I’ve been eating in Boston (and, this month, in Yerevan, Armenia!). This one highlights food and wine in Armenia, described in the “yerevan” section below.
You can read May’s issue here.
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I spend the weeks leading up to a trip heavily researching every restaurant I want to visit while there. But on every trip I, inevitably, start dreaming about what I’ll cook once I’m back in my beloved kitchen. This year, I spent the first half of June in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, visiting family and indulging in all the new restaurants that have cropped up during my six month absence.
It seems silly to look up restaurants in your own hometown, but Yerevan is a city constantly in flux. Hot new restaurants open all the time, spend six months in the limelight, lose their edge, and are replaced by a hotter new spot. We don’t have an Eater Yerevan or local guide site that ranks or announces new restaurants, so you have to talk to people about what’s new or just walk through the city to see what’s going on.
I love finding restaurants this way. I imagine it’s how people must have found where to eat pre-internet, through word of mouth and by just committing to trying a place without knowing how your meal will turn out (i.e. going to a restaurant without spending 30 minutes browsing reviews first, can you imagine?) or having to snag a reservation far in advance. I find myself feeling nostalgic for a time when “the internet” didn’t control so much of my life and my tastes. Travel outside the US usually allows me a glimpse into a more organic, slower way of life.
Luckily, Yerevan is extremely walkable — our wide sidewalks are shaded, and while the sun is piercingly hot in the summer the air is dry as a bone so you never really sweat. There’s plenty of public seating and fountains (carved into traditional tuff stone) with running ice-cold water all around the city to rehydrate on these walks. It helps, too, that Yerevan’s city center is only about 1.5 miles wide in either direction. Below, under “yerevan,” you can read more about the city’s food scene, wine, and homemade meals.
boston pt i
I rung in the first day of June in Boston with a date on a park bench with my partner, which involved a heavenly cheese gifted to me for my birthday, crackers, strawberries, and a bottle of sparkly. I read somewhere that sparkling wines are versatile and should be enjoyed outside special occasions, so I’ve been leaning into this advice! So far, sparking wine is accompanying my love of summer quite nicely.
That same day, (as usual for my Sundays), Caio and I went out again, this time to Ganku Itetsu in Brookline. This place is Boston’s unspoken best ramen spot. I switch up my ramen order every time, but I always get the kaarage fried chicken with Thai curry dipping sauce.
Post dinner, I snuck a cup of ice cream from Far Out, a New Zealand-style ice cream spot, into the Coolidge Corner Theatre to watch an unfortunately terrible movie (Babes with Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau) that I had high expectations for.
yerevan
My trip to Yerevan was a blur and passed much quicker than I wanted it to. At home, it was filled with foods my mother patiently makes for all of us — traditional foods that I never make in Boston because they require too much work.
There was kubba bil siniya (kubba in a pan), a delightfully sour vegetarian dolma (I may write a recipe for this some day, but for now, I’m happy buying overpriced dolma from the store), and, on my last day there, kubba hameth (a dumpling with a rice flour exterior and ground meat interior stewed in a tomato soup), my favorite meal.
No trip to Armenia is complete without a barbecue, and this time I was treated to two: one homemade, the other takeout. In Iraq, our barbecue consisted of a lot of lamb, chicken, and sometimes beef (never pork), which is still what we grill at home in Yerevan. In Armenia, restaurants grill up mainly pork cuts (especially pork chops), which is what we always order, with some lamb and beef offerings on the menu.
The best part of these meals is that the tray holding the grilled meat is lined with paper-thin layers of lavash. The lavash is laid under and above the grilled meat to keep it warm while everything finishes grilling. The lavash soaks up any runoff juices and fats, turning soggy and delicious, perfect for snacking on long after the meal is over. I roll up one or two cubes of beef or chicken kufta into a piece of lavash alongside morsels of grilled and charred eggplant, tomato, onion, or green pepper. The locally grilled pork chops I prefer to eat as is, without bread.
In the summer, when it’s much too hot to bother with baking dessert, we’ll often eat cold watermelon to brush off the day’s heat, or mom will set out a plate of cut fruit for the family, often with cherries and apricots picked from our two trees in the garden.
My first weekend in Yerevan I learned that a wine festival was taking place. The festival shut down a couple of streets in the city and was lined with an endless array of wine sellers (organizers said there were 700 varieties to try), the vast majority of which are grown in Armenia and cultivated from local grapes. For 12,000 AMD (or $31 USD), I got a little sling bag with a stemmed wine glass and 12 tickets, which I used to sample 6-8 wines. I used up all my tickets the first day and went back the next day for another round of sampling, this time purchasing three bottles to bring home.
For decades, Armenia’s wine scene was dominated by Karas, kind of regarded as the king of Armenian wines. I never liked Karas. I forced myself to drink it for years before finally giving up and admitting I hate that style of super dry, super bodied red wine.
My last several trips home I’ve focused on expanding my knowledge of Armenian wine by going to more wine bars and exploring their local offerings and buying bottles directly from these knowledgeable bars as opposed to the supermarket. The one I’m most excited to drink is this Tushpa red Pet Nat, made of the Tozot grape variety. The sample I had was fizzy with large bubbles, but light bodied and refreshing.
I’ve been fascinated with Tushpa for a bit. Their mission statement is eager to “revive ancient Armenian winemaking traditions” (we are, after all, a country that has produced wine since at least 4100 BC). I love that someone is trying to make Armenian wine unstuffy, fun, young, accessible for a new generation of wine drinkers.
This was my first wine festival ever but I think it’s fair to say that it was incredible. The streets was packed and lively with the sounds of Armenian, Russian, English, Farsi, French, German, and Hindi. The wine sellers were knowledgeable and passionate, excited to share their products with the slightly buzzed crowd.
Most of all, I loved the accessibility of this event: if you didn’t want to pay, you could still walk through it to enjoy the atmosphere. The streets weren’t closed off to minors, so the crowd was a great mix of young people, families, the elderly, tourists, and locals alike (children, of course, were not drinking wine, but they still got to experience a part of their country’s heritage in a safe setting that normalizes responsible alcohol consumption).
Waste at the festival was minimal, as everyone had purchased a reusable wine glass and not a single wine vendor offered paper or plastic cups. For snacks to go with drinking, I got zhingyalov hats, which is a vegan griddled flatbread stuffed with a million green herbs originating from Artsakh and later a shawarma from a Tumanyan Shawarma stall. My shawarma was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted, likely because I was tipsy and happy after a spontaneous dance party erupted on the street. I texted my partner that pizza can never be her (shawarma).
For the rest of my time in the city, I had a bunch of casual meals. I got an incredible strawberry banana smoothie from a tiny street stall (low cost juice and smoothie spots like this are common around the city), had lahmajun (a flatbread with a ground meat and pepper paste on top) with family, a latte from a new coffee spot operating out of a literal car garage (voch luys voch mut, meaning “neither bright nor dark”), and reconnected with a high school classmate over French patisserie.
It scares me, sometimes, how wonderful it is to visit Armenia in the summer. The wine festival, especially, had me doubting my choice of living in the US. Yerevan is an incredibly international city where life is easier than it is out here. The country, Armenia, is gorgeous — the mountains call to me. All that’s missing is the sea. Armenia has opened up a lot since I left, become a lot more progressive and a lot more diverse with a large population of new Indian and Russian immigrants and the city has been swept up in a wave of international culinary influence.
I think my parents have sensed my unhappiness with life in the US as of late, and every year they try a little harder to entice me to come back. Maybe it’s that I’m older now and miss my siblings and wish to be closer to family. Maybe it’s that the last ten years here have taught me that striving yields very little in the US. Maybe it’s that I want an easier life rather than a big life. But every year I feel this pull, and it’s almost like at some point, my family won’t even have to try anymore for me to make the decision to move back.
Maybe Armenia, maybe one day.
For now, I’m thankful to have had a wonderful visit.
boston pt ii
I got back to Boston on a Monday evening and had a jarring jump back into my real life. I had no time for a proper grocery haul nor cooking, since the next day I got right back into checking out restaurants for some assignments I’m writing (stay tuned!). Tbh, this was the best case scenario: that first week I was back was ungodly hot and humid, and cooking was the last thing I wanted to do.
The final weekend of the month I made shakshuka for brunch, and this simple act of finally cooking a familiar meal in my kitchen recentered me. You can find my trusty shakshuka recipe here.
The neighbors organized a potluck lunch in our shared garden, for which I made Smitten Kitchen’s roasted carrot pasta salad and Louisa’s Cake.
I’m reflecting on how beautiful it is to know your neighbors, to get to eat with them, and to have shared experiences as a “household” (or as a “buildinghold,” perhaps?). We’ve had Christmas dinner together, gone skiing together, they were included in my birthday party, and now we’ve enjoyed a potluck together. I think this is one part of what it means to be plugged into your community, and the experience makes me want to be friends with all future neighbors I may encounter.
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photo gallery here
If you liked reading about this trip to Yerevan and want to read more, I’ve actually written about Armenia several times before! There’s this piece commemorating the 107th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, one about Armenian women fighters in the 1880s and our inherent connection to Palestine, a shakshuka recipe and notes from a winter visit to Yerevan, as well as another recap of a summer visit that includes scenes from the countryside.
Made my mouth water and my shoulder slacken with the comfort that oozed from this piece, thank you Lala
This was so wonderful to read. I’m also so jealous!