For decades, Armenian immigrant food in Los Angeles was the hospitable shop skewering varieties of kebab, charring lahmadjoon in a brick oven or slicing shawarma onto pita bread, sumac and roasted garlic puncturing the air, streaming from the vertical rotisserie out to the sidewalks.When a genocide and political turmoils forced millions of Armenians out of their homeland, their culinary heritage met influences from the Middle East and other countries where they found refuge. They carried those traditions — some old, others more recent — all the way to the United States, where food became one of the most important and defining facets of the community. As the Armenian community in Los Angeles grew to become one of the largest outside of Armenia, it became more and more difficult to distinguish Armenian food as a whole.
