Armenian Food: 15 Dishes to Try

Armenian food is old, generous and built around the table rather than the plate: a spread of grilled meat, fresh herbs, warm bread and homemade cheese that keeps arriving until you surrender. The flavours lean on lamb and pork, cracked wheat, apricots and pomegranate, tangy dried fruits and a lot of fresh green stuff, and the country’s headline claim is a serious one, since it sits on the oldest winemaking tradition on earth. Below are fifteen dishes and drinks worth going out of your way for, grouped roughly the way a meal unfolds, along with a steer on where to find each.

One habit to adopt straight away: order fewer main courses than you think you need and more of the small stuff. A Caucasian table runs on shared plates, and the starters, breads and cheeses are often the best part.

Off the grill and the fire

Khorovats is the closest thing Armenia has to a national dish, and it is the meal most families default to for any celebration. It is barbecue, but taken seriously: chunks of pork, lamb or beef marinated and grilled over glowing embers, ideally grapevine cuttings, then piled onto lavash with grilled vegetables and raw onion. There is even an aubergine-and-pepper version, sometimes called summer khorovats, for the vegetable side of the table. Order it anywhere a wood fire is going and you will not go wrong.

Ishkhan, the “prince” trout endemic to Lake Sevan, is the fish to try, usually grilled whole or stuffed. A word of honesty here: the wild Sevan trout has been under real pressure for decades, and much of what you eat is farmed rather than caught wild, so treat it as a treat rather than an everyday order. It is at its best, unsurprisingly, at the lakeside eateries around Lake Sevan itself.

Then there is khash, the dish locals will dare you to try. It is a plain, rich broth of slow-boiled cow’s feet and tendons, eaten early on winter mornings with masses of garlic, dried lavash crumbled in, and a shot of vodka to steel yourself. It is deeply traditional, a wintertime social ritual as much as a meal, and genuinely an acquired taste. Nobody will mind if you admire it from a distance.

Slow-cooked comfort

Tolma (you will also see it as dolma) is the one to actually seek out. In its classic form it is minced meat and rice with herbs, wrapped in a grape or cabbage leaf and simmered until tender, served with a garlicky yogurt to spoon over. There are two variations worth knowing: the stuffed-vegetable “Echmiadzin” tolma, and a meatless summer version made with beans and grains for fasting days, which is arguably even better.

Harissa is winter food and ritual food both: a porridge of cracked wheat and lamb or chicken, cooked for hours and beaten until it turns silky and almost stretchy. It is plain-looking and deeply savoury, tied to the village feast at Musa Ler, and the kind of thing that tastes of somebody’s grandmother’s kitchen.

Two soups round out the comfort category. Spas (also called tanabur) is a warm, tangy soup of yogurt thickened with wheat or barley grains and flecked with herbs, served hot in winter and sometimes cold in summer. It is the Armenian answer to chicken soup, soothing and a little sour, and a good gentle introduction to the country’s love of fermented dairy.

Bread, greens and cheese

Lavash is not a side; it is the foundation of the whole meal. The thin, soft flatbread is slapped onto the searing inner wall of a clay tonir oven and peeled off in seconds, then used to wrap the grill, scoop up dips, or simply torn and eaten. Its cultural weight is real: the craft of making lavash was added to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2014. Watch it being baked at least once, ideally in a village.

Zhingyalov hats is the green one, and a favourite of anyone who tries it: a thin flatbread packed with a dozen or more chopped wild herbs and greens, then griddled. It comes from the south (Syunik and Artsakh) but turns up all over Yerevan now, and it is cheap, filling and completely vegetarian. Chase it down.

Cheese deserves its own mention, because Armenians eat a lot of it at every meal. The one you will notice is chechil, the salty, braided string cheese that peels apart in strands, sometimes smoked. Beyond it lie sharper aged cheeses like motal, cured in a clay pot or animal skin, and the milder lori. A plate of cheese, greens and lavash is the default opening to any table.

Cured meats

Two cured specialities show up on any meze spread. Basturma is air-dried beef, pressed and coated in a thick red paste of fenugreek and spices called chaman, then sliced wafer-thin; it is intense, garlicky and a little funky, and a small amount goes a long way. Sujuk is its cousin, a firm, spiced dry sausage in the same savoury family.

A quick trap to sidestep: the word sujuk (soujoukh) also names a completely different, sweet thing, a rope of walnuts dipped repeatedly in thickened grape juice, closer to what Georgians call churchkhela. If a menu offers “sujuk” as a dessert, that is the sweet one, not the sausage.

Something sweet, and something to drink

Gata is the everyday sweet, a rich pastry or sweet bread wrapped around a filling of butter, sugar and flour called khoriz, often stamped with a decorative pattern on top. Every region bakes its own version, and the ones sold at monastery gates (Geghard is famous for it) make the ideal road-trip snack.

Gapama is the showpiece, a whole pumpkin hollowed out and stuffed with rice, dried apricots, plums, raisins and nuts, then baked until the shell goes soft and the filling turns fragrant. It is a festive, cold-weather dish, more likely at a New Year table or a special dinner than on a daily menu, and worth ordering ahead if a restaurant will make it.

Now the drinks, and this is where Armenia quietly overdelivers. Armenian wine is having a genuine revival, led by the reds of the Areni grape from the southern region of Vayots Dzor. The pedigree is extraordinary: the Areni-1 cave nearby holds the remains of the oldest known winery on earth, dated to roughly 4100 to 4000 BC, so people have been pressing grapes in this valley for about six thousand years. Look for dry Areni reds and the crisp white Voskehat, easily found in the wine bars along Saryan Street in the capital. To taste them where the grapes grow, our guide to Areni’s wine country covers the cellars, the ancient cave and the October festival.

Finally, Armenian brandy, which locals proudly call cognac even though it legally is not: the Cognac name belongs to a specific region of France. The Yerevan distilleries behind labels like Ararat and Noy trace their craft to the 1880s, won acclaim at turn-of-the-century French exhibitions, and are wrapped in a famous (if legendary) Churchill story. Our deep-dive on Yerevan brandy covers the two factories, the tastings and the truth behind the tales. A small glass after dinner, alongside a cup of thick, unfiltered Armenian coffee brewed in a little pot called a jazzve, is the proper way to end a meal here.

Armenian food is best learned at the table, so the practical move is simply to eat widely and share plates. The wine bars and taverns of the capital, laid out in our guide to things to do in Yerevan, are the easiest place to graze through half this list in a couple of evenings, while a run out through the wine country or the monasteries, covered in our best day trips from Yerevan, pairs the gata, the village bread and the Areni reds with the scenery they belong to.