RESTAURATEUR MIXES ARMENIAN AND ARMENIAN CUISINE
By Meghan B. Kelly
Lexington Minuteman
s/x1369587964/Restaurateur-mixes-Armenian-and-Arme nian-cuisine
Dec 25 2008
MA
Lexington – A thriving small business seems to be anomaly in today’s
world of dire economic headlines. But for the proprietors of Aunt
Mary’s World Café, it’s easily explainable: good food at reasonable
prices.
Owner and manager Tim Enright said since Aunt Mary’s opened Nov. 1,
customers have come from all over to sample hamburgers, sandwiches
and traditional Armenian foods like falafel, ecch and losh kebab.
The Lexington Minuteman grabbed a few minutes with Enright at his
café, located at 321 Woburn St. The café does takeout only and
takes orders at 781-652-0468.
Q: How did you get started in the restaurant business?
A: My wife, Noushig Ajgopian, and I met working in a hotel about 20
years ago. She was the catering director and I was the chef at the
Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge. We got married and had kids and we
always talked about having our own little place. I pulled in to get
a coffee one morning and saw the sign that said "for rent." That was
how we got started. This was back in June.
We’ve always talked about it — a lot of people want to open their
own place, so that’s what we did.
Q: What’s your official role in the operation?
A: I am the chief cook and bottle washer. I do all the baking and
make the soups. We have someone part-time who makes the sandwiches
and helps customers. I do a lot of it myself.
Q: What kinds of food do you serve?
A: My wife is Armenian, of Armenian heritage. We have a lot of vegan,
vegetarian, Armenian dishes that are part of the mezze table. Instead
of antipasto, they have mezze. It may seem new to Lexington people,
where a lot of new cuisine is the emperor’s new clothes, but a lot
of these dishes have been handed down [through] generations. They’re
new here, but they’re not new, and they’re really delicious. They’re
great. I had been a chef for a long time when I met my wife, but the
Armenian cuisine was something new to me.
Q: How have things been going so far? It’s 1:30 and there is a bit
of a line out there.
A: It’s been an adventure. It’s up and down. We have a lot of repeat
customers. People that come, come back, which is nice. They tell
their friends.
I also have twin boys in high school, at LHS, and they are the burger
connoisseurs of the world. That’s why we have the world café thing. We
have great hamburgers, we have great hot dogs … We have some big
sandwiches, we have a great hamburger, we have a great hot dog.
We also have falafel, which is my mother-in-law’s recipe … for me to
get it written down correctly and do it right, it took some research
this summer, with everybody yelling at me. But it worked out great.
Q: So how did you come up with the name "Aunt Mary’s"?
A: It’s actually my father’s aunt — my great-aunt Mary. She was a
driving force in my life, and my wife also has an aunt Mary.
[My wife] was the one who actually named it. She said, "Why don’t
we call it Aunt Mary’s, name it after Aunt Mary, because everybody
has an Aunt Mary?" It’s warm, it’s comfortable. And then we’re not
locked into any one type of cuisine — we’ve got chicken parmesan,
we’ve got reubens, we’ve got sauerkraut, we’ve got homemade tourshi,
which is a turnip pickle that goes on the falafel.
I can make whatever I want and it still falls under world
cuisine. [laughs]
Q: Have your kids been helping out?
A: They’re very supportive. They’re in ninth grade and they are the
arbiters of what’s good. They said there’s no place around to get
good hamburgers.
Q: There doesn’t seem to be a lot of burger joints in Lexington.
A: Not the big national chains; there’s no dedicated hamburger
place. We don’t do much, but what we do, we try to do as well as
we can. Try to pay attention to all the details. We got the bun, I
have a special toaster for it, a special mold the hamburgers go in
so they’re all the same size … They weigh them, they season them
– they’re 100 percent ground Angus chuck – they season it, put it
in the mold, so they’re all the same size and cooked the same way,
just like you get from a big machine, but the texture’s different,
because they’re hand-packed.
And we also have one for the losh kebab, which is like an Armenian
hamburger, with onions and spices. It’s longer and thinner than
a hamburger, and we put that in a wrap, with an onion salad and an
onion, tomato and pepper relish. So we’re doing stuff one at a time.
When I was young, people did stuff from scratch, by hand, and there
are some people that do that, and we wanted to do that. As much as
we can be part of that community, we want to do it.
Q: Did the state of the economy make you nervous to open up?
A: Yes it did. But when we made the deal, we had to build it out, in
June, everything was great. The presidential race was great … the
economy was good … But we try to do something new every day. We do
have a lot of people coming back, asking what have you got today. We
change the soups daily, or a few times a day, depending on how they
go, which is why it says "soup of the moment." It looks like today
I’m going to run out.
Q: What are you serving today?
A: Today we have a chicken in rice with saffron and peppers, and a
beet borscht that has kind of gained a following. If you like beets,
you can’t get it anywhere else. We try to run one kind of "mainstream"
soup and one kind of oddball thing.
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