Lavash, a fire-baked flatbread, forms the backbone of Armenian cuisine. Pliable, paper-thin and eaten with every meal, it is brilliantly versatile: for lunch, folded into a pocket and stuffed with brined cheese and pickled vegetables; for dinner, used for scooping up thick soups or stews.
I first tasted lavash in downtown Yerevan, at a wildly popular restaurant named after the bread itself, the morning after I arrived in Armenia during a book research trip a few years ago. Seated inside Lavash, I watched through a glass wall as a troupe of cheery Armenian bakers rolled out huge ovals of thin dough, before slapping them against the wall of a traditional clay oven called a tonir and, after a minute or so, pulling out the slightly blistered bread. Served alongside a basket of the just-baked lavash that warm summer morning was a cheese omelette brightened by blades of fresh tarragon that remains firmly planted in my memories.
Baking lavash in Tsaghkunk’s old tonir | Courtesy Tsaghkunk Restaurant & Glkhatun
So vital is lavash – not just within Armenia’s borders but in diaspora kitchens everywhere from Paris to Los Angeles – that UNESCO recognises it as a critical part of Armenian heritage. If a restaurant has the means, and space, it will invariably have its own on-site tonir for making fresh lavash. And nowhere is it more intriguing to see this in action than at Tsaghkunk, a restaurant that takes its name from the village it sits in, a 20-minute drive from Lake Sevan.
A group of artists I chatted to by the shores of the lake had just been to the restaurant – and insisted I go and try the “amazing” food. Framed by misty hills rich with wildflowers and cows grazing, Tsaghkunk is where Artak Zargaryan once worked as a village school teacher; today, he has helped develop this remarkable restaurant as part of The Cradle, an NGO aiming to restore ancient Armenian sites. To the side of the main restaurant is a stone-built dwelling with grass sprouting from its roof like a Hobbit house. A few years ago, excavations here uncovered this small 18th-century home with two original tonir ovens – now kept behind glass for protection.
Tsaghkunk was restored by The Cradle, an NGO aiming to revitalise ancient Armenian sites
Quiet, dark and cool as a sea cave, there is a reverence to the space, a sense of holiness even. “Making lavash is a form of worship, a spiritual experience not just for food. When women baked here, so many years ago, they would have also been praying. Now we bake here for our guests, but only ever bread, never meat or other things. When people dine at the restaurant, they can come and see this place. It’s nice to sit in silence and to feel the history,” Zargaryan says.
In the main restaurant, with large windows offering a panorama of village life still ruled by the cycle of the seasons, and the warm smell of wood rising from the custom-made furniture, chefs are inventive. They serve up spherical ponchiks, similar to doughnuts, but filled with foraged mountain herbs and matsun (yoghurt), crisp on the outside, soft and savoury inside; crispy fried chechil cheese with buttermilk; and all manner of salads and soups. Zargaryan sometimes drives out to the surrounding hills himself with the cooks to search for unusual parasol mushrooms and herbs. He cannot tell me exactly which herbs and plants these are, as “many are so local that they have no name in English”. The young artists were right to send me.
