I’ve seen the future of Los Angeles dining, and it can be found inside a ghost kitchen in a nondescript area of Glendale, just off San Fernando Road. III Mas Bakery & Deli, run by husband and wife duo Arthur Grigoryan and Takouhi Petrosyan, offers only nine items: various baked goods and a couple of sandwiches with an Armenian-meets-American twist. But that’s like describing "Giant Steps" by John Coltrane as a simple little ditty you can hum.
This food is so good that it’s downright mind-blowing, and the sandwiches — particularly the Basturma brisket — are some of the best I've had in L.A. I was enraptured by all the details, from ingredients to historical influences to its ability to tie everything together coherently.
It's a specific brand of soulful cooking, telling an essential story of Los Angeles through the lens of one of its most significant immigrant communities. Grigoryan previously worked at Nancy Silverton's Osteria Mozza restaurant before leaving in 2018. Grigoryan started III Mas (pronounced yiro-mas) to create recipes that combined Texas barbeque with Middle Eastern flavors.
However, in 2020, when the armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan occurred, they realized they wanted to preserve the traditional cooking methods of their ancestral homeland, while breathing a new sense of life into it as two Armenian Americans who grew up in SoCal. Grigoryan and Petrosyan created a new concept based on traditional Jewish and Italian American deli recipes b.