What to eat in Armenia, and the Areni revival

The wine is the more surprising half of the story. Armenia has a claim on the oldest known winemaking installation anywhere and, far more usefully, a fifteen-year revival of small producers working with grapes that grow nowhere else.

Here is what to order, where, and what is overrated.

The dishes to know

Lavash. The thin unleavened bread slapped onto the wall of a tonir, a clay oven sunk into the ground, and peeled off in sheets. It is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list, and you should watch it being made once. It is also structural: you wrap things in it, you use it as a plate, and in the countryside it is dried and stacked and revived with water months later.

Khorovats. The barbecue that anchors every Armenian family occasion. Pork, lamb or veal on skewers over vine or fruitwood, plus whole aubergines, peppers and tomatoes charred on the same fire and then peeled and chopped into a smoky salad, which is the best part and is called khorovats too. Armenians argue about khorovats the way other countries argue about football.

Dolma. Two families of it. Tolma in vine leaves with spiced minced meat and rice, and the winter version wrapped in cabbage. There is also a vegetarian pasus tolma made with lentils and beans and eaten during fasting periods, and it is better than the meat version.

Ghapama. A pumpkin hollowed out, stuffed with rice, honey, walnuts and dried fruit, sealed and baked, then cut open at the table. Autumn and festival food, and if you are in a village house in October ask about it.

Harissa. Wheat and chicken cooked down over many hours into a thick, plain, almost porridge-like dish. It tastes simpler than it sounds and it carries real cultural weight, associated with commemoration and survival. Worth eating once and worth asking your guide about.

Khash. A winter dish of cattle feet boiled overnight and eaten early with garlic, lavash and vodka. A social ritual rather than a meal, and a January thing.

Basturma and sujuk. The cured meats. Basturma is air-dried beef coated in a fenugreek and paprika paste and sliced very thin. Sujuk is the spiced sausage. Both are excellent and both are on every breakfast table.

Spas. A warm yoghurt and wheat soup with herbs, which is the Armenian comfort food and the thing to eat after a heavy night.

Gata. The sweet pastry you will be handed at every monastery gate, and it varies by region. The version sold at the Geghard car park is baked in front of you and is worth stopping for.

The fruit. Armenia is a fruit country and the apricot is the national one. In summer the markets have apricots, peaches, figs, pomegranates and grapes at a quality that surprises people, and the dried fruit and sujukh, the walnut-and-grape-must sweet, keep well and travel home.

The cheese and the greens. Chechil, the pulled string cheese, and lori and motal, aged in clay. The herb plate on every table is not a garnish and it is meant to be eaten with everything.

Wine, and what has actually changed

Armenia has a claim on the oldest known winemaking installation anywhere, excavated in a cave at Areni village in Vayots Dzor and dated to around 4100 BC. That is archaeology. The interesting story is much more recent.

For most of the twentieth century Armenia made brandy and Georgia made wine, by Soviet allocation, and Armenian table wine effectively disappeared. What has happened since roughly 2010 is a revival built on two indigenous grapes.

Areni Noir is a thin-skinned red grape grown at high altitude, mostly between about 4,000 and 5,600 feet (1,200 to 1,700 m), on volcanic soils. It makes a light-bodied, high-acid, savoury red with red fruit and a stony edge, and it tastes like nothing else. It is much closer to a cool-climate Pinot Noir in weight than to anything you would expect from a hot country, because the altitude does the work the latitude does not.

Voskehat is the white, sometimes called the queen of Armenian grapes, and it has improved enormously in a decade. Expect texture and orchard fruit rather than aromatics.

There are amber skin-contact wines in Armenia too, and karas, the local clay vessel, is used by a number of producers. They are worth trying, and Georgia does that style better and at greater depth. Armenia’s own case is the altitude reds.

The producers are small, the cellars are around Areni and Yeghegnadzor, and most of them will sit you down with the person who made the wine. A tasting with bread, cheese and dried fruit costs $10 to $20 a head and it is the best value afternoon in the country. Our standing advice for a first trip is to swap a fourth monastery for a cellar. Our wine and food route is nine days built on that principle.

Brandy, honestly

Armenian brandy is the other national product and it is genuinely good. The large Yerevan houses run tours, and they are polished, corporate and interesting for an hour if you like production processes. The tasting at the end is the point.

Two honest notes. The tours are the most heavily marketed activity in Yerevan and they are not the best use of an afternoon on a short trip. And the entry-level bottles sold to visitors are not the ones worth carrying home, so ask what the older expressions taste like before you buy.

Where to eat, by place

Yerevan. The city has changed a great deal in ten years and there are now three categories worth your evenings. The modern Armenian kitchens reworking the canon with proper technique, a small number of which are genuinely serious. The old-style places where the recipes have not moved in fifty years and the tolma is the reason to go. And the wine bars, which is where you learn fastest and where the Vayots Dzor producers are poured by the glass.

Eat late. The city does. Booking a table for seven means eating alone. Yerevan in three days builds the days around it.

The GUM market and the Vernissage. The covered market for dried fruit, sujukh, cheese, spices and pickles, with plenty of tasting and cheerful pressure to buy. Go in the morning. The Vernissage open-air market runs at weekends and is craft rather than food, but the two make a good half day together.

Vayots Dzor. Cellar lunches at the wine estates, and village guesthouse dinners, which are where the best food on an Armenian trip usually happens. Ask for tolma if it is the season.

Dilijan and Tavush. Forest food. Mushrooms, herbs, river fish, and the guesthouses in the villages around Haghartsin.

Lake Sevan. Ishkhan, the Sevan trout, and crayfish from the lake, grilled at the shore restaurants. The setting is the reason and the cooking is straightforward. Be aware that ishkhan stocks have been under pressure for decades and much of what is served is farmed, which is fine and worth knowing.

Gyumri. The second city has its own food identity and a reputation for humour and hospitality. If you are going north, eat there.

Syunik and Goris. Simple, hearty and generous. Guesthouse tables again, and the dried fruit and walnut sweets of the south.

What is overrated

• The big brandy factory tour on an eight-day trip. One hour of process and a small pour. There are better afternoons.
• Restaurants with folk shows. They exist for coach groups. The food is a buffet and the dancing is a performance rather than a thing that was happening anyway.
• Sevan shore restaurants in August. Busy, slow and geared to volume. The lake is worth the day, the lunch is not the reason.
• Buying wine at the airport. Buy it at the cellar in Vayots Dzor for a third of the price, from the person who made it.
• A fourth and fifth monastery in place of a cellar or a market. This is the swap we push hardest for, and it is covered in what we would skip in Armenia.

How the eating actually gets arranged

The best meals in Armenia are in houses, and they are not bookable from a website. Our Yerevan partner arranges village tables in Vayots Dzor and Tavush with families they have known for years, and that is the one part of Armenian eating that genuinely needs somebody on the ground. GO EAST staffs its own offices in Japan, Vietnam, India and the Philippines, and Armenia runs through that Yerevan partner rather than an office of our own.

Plan this trip

Tell us how much of your Armenia trip you want built around the table, and a specialist will put the right cellars, the right market mornings and a village dinner into your outline. Free, and with no obligation.

Start planning

Keep reading

• Armenia: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Yerevan in three days
• Armenia for the first time
• What we would skip in Armenia
• Armenia wine and food, 9 days
• All our Armenia trips

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