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SW EET THINGS
Top 10 Armenian bakeries in Southern California
In the mood for unusual sweets? Here are our top 10 among the myriad local
Armenian bakeries.
April 18, 2007
As home to one of the largest Armenian colonies in the world, Los Angeles
supports about 70 Armenian bakeries. They suggest that Armenians may just
have the biggest sweet tooth in the world.
And the most eclectic sweet tooth too. Beside their own ancient pastries
such as a bread-y coffee cake called gata, they’re into baklavas, Persian
fritters and Russian doughnuts. On top of that, Armenia has cultural ties
with France dating back to the Crusades, so a lot of the bakeries specialize
in French pastry. Still, they usually sell some baklavas, gatas, perok (a
coffee cake-like fruit tart) and the flaky cookie nazouk.
Though there are pastry shops in the older Armenian hotspots of north
Pasadena and east Hollywood, Glendale is the place to go. It has 14 pastry
shops – and there’s plenty of spillover in Burbank, North Hollywood and
elsewhere in the Valley.
We checked out nearly 50 Armenian bakeries. This is our selection of the top
10 for the non-French side of the Armenian pastry menu.
Baklava Factory, 1415 E. Colorado Ave., Suite K, Glendale, (818) 548-7070,
also 17145 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 728-1600 and 12909 Sherman Way,
North Hollywood, (818) 764-1011, Well-made baklava,
cookies and fritters, though not baked on the premises but in a central
bakery in Sylmar.
Lord & Villa Bakery, 1120 N. Pacific Ave., No. 3, Glendale, (818) 500-8040.
An upscale operation, mostly French, but it also has a large Armenian
section that includes several varieties of fruit-filled gata. The cherry
perok is positively overflowing with cherry filling.
Maggie’s Bakery, 6530 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, (818) 506-6265. A
big, gleaming pastry shop in an inconspicuous mall; three counters of French
pastries and one of baklavas, gatas and walnut-filled cookies. Particularly
notable for kul wushkur, a buttery, exceptionally flaky folded baklava (it
looks like a tiny book with its pages fluttering open) enclosing a
syrup-soaked walnut filling.
Maral’s Pastry, 17654 Vanowen St., Van Nuys, (818) 705-8921. Excellent
baklava-type pastries (of the tender, rather than the crisp, school), cheese
pastry (halawat jibn), sesame-pistachio cookies (barazek) and those fabulous
tahini cookies.
Movses Pastry, 1755 W. Glenoaks Blvd., No. 4, Glendale, (818) 545-0099;
Half French, half Armenian. Good fresh baklava,
several flavors of perok and gata, a number of nazouks.
Oasis Pastry (also known as Mary’s Oasis or M. Shatila), 801 S. Glendale
Blvd., Glendale, (818) 244-2255. It may be Lebanese-owned, but it’s in the
middle of Armenian Glendale and most of the employees speak Armenian. Very
good pastries, including a remarkably flaky one that resembles kul wushkur
but which they insist on calling almond baklava.
Panos Pastry Bakery, 5150 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 661-0335; also
418 S. Central Ave., Glendale, (818) 502-0549; A grand
pastry palace with marble floors and mirrors, a large selection of Armenian
pastries and an even larger one of French pastries. Long the standard of
Hollywood Armenian bakeries; the baklava is light and crisp but not terribly
buttery.
Sarkis Pastry, 1111 S. Glendale Ave., Glendale, (818) 956-6636;
The pride of Glendale has one of the widest ranges of
Middle Eastern pastries around, including osmanlia (layers of kadayif and
nuts) and tahini cookies.
Van Bakery, 5409 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 466-2450; also 620 S.
Glendale Ave., Suite H, Glendale, (818) 548-5253. In addition to the usual
pastries, Van makes what looks like a baklava that’s dribbled with a little
chocolate. Inside, there’s a layer of crisp kadayif pastry, making it
lighter and crunchier than ordinary baklava.
Vrej Pastry, 1074 N. Allen Ave., Pasadena, (626) 797-2331; also 11148 Balboa
Blvd., Granada Hills, (818) 366-2526; and 1791 East Route 66, Glendora,
(626) 914-1940. Good for cheese pastry, barazek and dainty burma (kadayif
nut rolls).
– Charles Perry
Hot on the trail of tahini cookies
Even with 70-odd Armenian bakeries in the L.A. area, it’s a challenge to get
someone to share the recipe.
By Charles Perry
Times Staff Writer
April 18, 2007
The other day, a co-worker brought in some mysterious cookies from an
Armenian bakery, a little sheepish about having polished off about a third
of them on the way.
They were tan domes with a tight spiral pattern on top, making them look a
bit like snail shells lying on their sides. The pastry had a distinctive
taste, more wholesome than cookie dough, followed by a little blast of
richness from that spiral, which turned out to be a filling of sesame
tahini. It tasted like peanut butter without peanut butter’s funky edge.
In other words, these were cookies we could eat a lot of, and we proceeded
to do so. But not before I saved one or two to explore their mystery.
When you cut one in half, the interior turned out to be curving lines of
pastry alternating with darker caverns of sesame filling, vaguely like the
pattern of layers in a halved onion.
Whatever it was, the pastry was definitely not cookie dough. I had to know
what was going on here.
This plunged me into the vortex of the 70-odd Armenian bakeries in the L.A.
area. Some were bread bakeries, but a lot were filled with case after case
of French patisserie and syrup-soaked baklavas – dangerous places to wander
around in.
Only a couple of pastry shops made these tahini cookies. But how did this
innocent cookie end up in these glittering palaces of seduction anyway?
It turned out that this "cookie" is considered to be a bread – not a pastry
– because it’s made with yeast-risen dough. It happens to be a clever
variation on Middle Eastern tahini bread (in Arabic, khubz tahini; in
Armenian, tahinov hats), which is usually made as a pita-size flatbread.
Some Armenian bakeries, such as Taron in east Hollywood, make this big, flat
variety, but Maral’s Pastry in Van Nuys and Sarkis Pastry in Glendale make
the dome-cookie version.
Elusive recipe
To us, it was no contest: The dome shape is better. It’s a more convenient
size and easier to eat, and the balance of flavors is better.
But we wanted to know: How do you make these irresistible treats?
The only recipe I could find was in an obscure cookbook published 25 years
ago in Saudi Arabia, and it didn’t give the exact result we wanted, even
after tweaking it nine ways.
So I asked some Armenian bakers, but they were reluctant to give out their
recipes. One told me, "You ask about my business, you ask too many
questions, my friend."
Uh-oh. I should have foreseen this – it’s a Middle Eastern tradition, as I
already knew: When I traveled around Syria in 1980, I naively asked bakers
in every town from Damascus to Aleppo about the local pastries, and their
answers were always incomprehensible.
Finally, my driver took me aside and darkly told me, "Not even to their own
sons, not till they’re on their death beds, will they tell their secrets."
Well, I understood. It’s a bakery-eat-bakery world out there, and a pastry
chef doesn’t want to give up his edge. Still, that bread-cookie remained
outside our grasp.
Finally, Hovsep Sarkozian of Maral’s took pity on us and spelled it out. The
secret seemed to be (as we should have known): This is a cross between a
bread and a cookie, so it needs sugar and oil in the dough. Once it rises,
you shape it and bake it right away without the sort of rests and additional
rises that bread dough usually gets.
To tell the truth, even the versions that hadn’t been exactly what we wanted
– the ones with loose spirals or dough that was too puffy or the ones that
didn’t brown up enough – were quite good.
So finally the quest was over.
Not that I’m going to stop going to Armenian bakeries, mind you.
Man does not live by tahini bread alone.
charles.perry@latimes.com
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress