Rita took a puff of her cigarette and smiled. He saw himself coming back home, the lemonade still icy, his father gone. Rita was an Armenian Catholic schoolgirl growing up in the suburbs of Beirut in the late 1960s when she first set eyes on Mardiros Iskenderian, the bad boy gunning his banana yellow 442 Oldsmobile up and down the lane. “My aunt was totally provoking me the whole way,” he said. He took two lives. No, haven’t you heard the talk about the Pepsi company offering the family $30 million for the Zankou chain and trademark? He stuffed a 9mm handgun into his waistband and a .38-caliber revolver into his coat pocket and walked step by small step down the stairs. They had come with plenty of cash. After considering opening a dry cleaning business or selling men's suits, Iskenderian recognized a lack of restaurants catering to the growing Mediterranean immigrant population in Los Angeles. Doctors prescribed pills, but he wouldn’t take them. The restaurants are especially known for their spit-roasted chicken, shawarma, falafel, tahini, and a "secret" garlic sauce. He was the son most like Mardiros. His wife, Rita, who had fallen in love with him when she was 12, couldn’t believe the sight. When Margrit Iskenderian walked in a little after 2 p.m., she was carrying a big box of food. He parked his car and walked up the driveway past the koi pond in the entrance and knocked on the door. Zankou Chicken’s Garlic Paste Recipe; Zankou Chicken’s Garlic Paste Recipe. Something terrible, he knew, afflicted him. A day or so later, as it happened, the house caught fire. He told Steve he was certain that his mother and sisters were plotting against him. But what it meant to be Mardiros Iskenderian’s son had changed irrevocably that day . What struck him wasn’t the story’s lesson—that you can never escape the past—but what the storyteller had left out. The restaurants are especially known for their spit-roasted chicken, shawarma, falafel, tahini, and a "secret" garlic sauce. When he wasn’t working, he was catting around with his own gang of rich buddies. Or maybe his wife’s memory had played a trick, dressing him for the last time in white. Thus, from Turkey to Beirut to Hollywood to Glendale, from the genocide to the garlic paste to the mansion to the murders, it was all foretold. Or was he lucky enough to be just outside their reach? The drive to Aunt Dzovig’s house was a winding seven miles. Blood dripped off their knives, down a gutter, and into a drain. He kept skipping the gym to gorge on lobster and crab at Mariscos Colima in North Hollywood. [2] Vartkes Iskenderian died in 1992. Get a place of his own? He didn’t know she had a listening device broadcasting to a pimp, who stole his money . “Don’t shoot. Place raw garlic in a heavy duty blender … Each day at 6 p.m., when Margrit returned home from her long shift cooking at Zankou, Rita was there to greet her at the door. Jagadakeer, it was muttered. She set it down on the kitchen table, put on her white slippers, and greeted his sister and then him. He drove them there, nursed them through the cold turkey, and monitored their recoveries like a hawk. No “How do you feel today?” No “Are your treatments working?” She would pour a glass of water from the refrigerator, turn around, and walk upstairs to her room. This was the dish that Mardiros had invented , the best-seller they called tarna. And all his life, good and bad, he had done his best to make that true. Vanns Tellicherry Peppercorns, … In the days that followed the news of his cancer, Mardiros couldn’t help but notice that his mother’s behavior toward him had changed. He fired once into his sister’s brain. Vartkes, the youngest and perhaps the brightest, was using his allowance to buy marijuana. The Internet droned with foodies debating the chain’s “overrated” chicken or lamenting how the garlic paste had somehow lost its zest. The shadow they cast is not yours.” Then she rose, walked up the stairs to her bedroom, and shut the door. Carole Published November 17, 2020. Rita wondered if Mardiros simply felt sorry for his mother and sought to honor her service. Roof to roof, we passed each other notes. She wasn’t big on hugs or kisses; she could be downright stern, but she wanted her grandchildren to know what good food tasted like. Rita poured herself a soda, parted the black plastic curtain, and entered the main kitchen for all six of her Zankous. Every so often, he’d pile Rita and the kids into the Mercedes and take them to his favorite Chinese restaurant. Together, they had grown the chain by adding a store in West L.A. and one in Burbank, the fanciest of the bunch. They fired dozens of rounds, hitting Mardiros with bullet after bullet, 16 shots in all. Our mission is to serve fresh, quality and wholesome Mediterranean meals with a WOW experience. “To this day, I never see anybody as beautiful as my husband was. After all, Margrit had opposed the expansion from day one, and Mardiros alone owned Zankous nos. What made the garlic paste so fluffy and white and piercing? The housekeeper poured his mother a glass of lemonade and topped off his glass and the glass of his sister. zankou chicken recipes with photo and preparation instructions. For a man who was so near death, cancer everywhere, he looked beautiful. But she doesn’t know what it takes to move this business forward. He jumped out of the car and made a dash for it. It was one thing to be the second coming of a patriarch beloved by family and community. She was paying $15,000 a month in rent for a restaurant with no opening in sight. The ingredients were simple and fresh, Mardiros pledged, no shortcuts. Without them, the Muslim Arabs would have ruled the country. Great post, came home with Chicken Shawarma from Amir's (why Amir's doesn't have garlic sauce I don't know) and thought I have Zankou's sauce in the fridge, no problem! Her parents had forbidden her from seeing any boy, much less such a man. Look around, she told them. She was dressed in blue jeans and a long-sleeved brown sweater . He turned away and walked a dozen paces to the leather couch in the living room. The son left the cemetery that day with the same questions he had been lugging around for five years. Live images from each Zankou, the four her husband had built and the two she had opened since, popped up with a mouse click. I want to be a great person. Next week, he told himself. Up the hill, where the canyon oaks gave way to palm trees, neighbors had spilled out of their million-dollar estates. It was forbidden, but we fell in love.”. zankou chicken recipes from the best food bloggers. He wore the most beautiful perfume. None guessed right. Greed must never rear its head. He kept driving through the California farm fields until he reached Fresno. Dzovig would take them each morning, and Rita would pick them up. He watched her punish his father with the guilt of indebtedness. Yet it wasn’t the kind of wealth that let them lounge around playing golf or tennis. We love each other, and we will die for each other. The first Zankou Chicken … Picked Turnips, 1 half tray of Rice, 4 Pita Packs … Koo Koo Roo, Boston Market, Kenny Rogers—the street was littered with small chains that grew into bigger chains and imploded because they forgot what good food tasted like. It didn’t hurt, though, bro. Mardiros would take the Zankou concept and build a chain across the region. It became a big family scandal, with lots of threats back and forth. Mardiros put in long hours. Practice luring people into traps. And there was Dikran, the uneasy patriarch, who felt the need to speak for them all. And yet she kept a sense of humor, a kind of gallows giggle, that life, luck, had turned out the way it had. “That’s the raisin stealer’s grandson.” No one needed to tell him the moral. What his sister did to him, I cannot explain. So each day, without complaint, Rita finished rocking the baby and listened as the old lady told her story of survival, of the Turks rounding up all the Armenians in her village of Hajin in the spring of 1915 and herding them on a death march to the Syrian Desert. She and Mardiros’s surviving sister, Haygan, had been best friends since childhood. They took every clove of garlic that came whole and peeled from Gilroy and excised the tiny stem at the tip. The gap in their ages seemed to narrow as Rita blossomed into a tall beauty with big round eyes. Share recipe using Pinterest. Steve, tugged by his love for his grandmother, asked his father if he could ever find it in his heart to forgive her. Walk on eggshells? “My goal in life,” he said , “is to have as many people at my funeral, to have affected as many lives in a good way, as I can. She would come home from work, Rita would greet her as usual at the front door, and she would walk right past him and into the kitchen without a word. She got her money’s worth. Only when you got to know her well did she betray a hint of the anger she felt toward Mardiros. But she was confounded by the degree of devotion between mother and son. Share: Share recipe using facebookIconDesc. His parents, looking for something easier, wanted no part of the food business. He had become a born-again after a scandal in 1997 that had cost him his dream of being a lawyer. The only reason I go to Zankou now is when Arax is closed.” Zankou defenders shouted back: “What do you mean overrated? He maneuvered his black BMW down the steep canyon, looped along La Crescenta Avenue, and climbed the backside of the mountain until he reached the split-level brick and stucco house on Ayars Canyon Way. Usually he did not plan his visits to Forest Lawn. He parked out front, walked up to the tall entrance past two sago palms, and knocked on the door. Calorie Goal 1,973 cal. But then the lawyers marched in, and a war between the two sides broke out. Let’s duplicate our success. On the fourth day, he climbed back into his car and headed home. Five months earlier, Steve had insisted on hiring a supervisor for Pasadena, a woman who had a long career managing fast-food franchises such as McDonald’s. I had no position. He could only hope that his father had asked for forgiveness as he sat down on the couch and raised the gun to his head. [3], The first restaurant in Los Angeles opened in a section of East Hollywood called Little Armenia [4] and is located at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Normandie Avenue. Log Food. Others insisted there was no sense to be made of it because life made no sense, death made no sense. He kept a rooftop apartment across the alley from where she lived with her family. He saw himself as putty going in, a rich and beloved American tycoon coming out. So now I'm looking for a Zankou-style Armenian roast chicken specialist, but at a place other than Zankou. Steve took it personally. He was the son of the Zankou Chicken mogul who had murdered his mother and sister and then had the decency to kill himself. This time, as the highway opened up, his mind fixed on a different image from the past. He drove up the canyon to the mansion that sat on a ledge in the Verdugo Hills. She looked up and shook her head. He told Steve about setting the image of his mother to flames, and how that image had come back to light the fire that had burned the house. It was 2005, two years after the murders, and the grieving was finished. In 1962, Vartkes Iskenderian opened a small restaurant with just two dishes on the menu: chicken and Lule beef kebab. Next to God, it was his mother.”. Glendale was a city made new by three successive waves of Armenian refugees, first from Iran, then from Beirut, and now from Armenia itself . With them, the Christian Arabs kept a narrow edge. “Please, Dad, no.”. He was always dressed in Pierre Cardin or something. Nothing, he assured them, would change at home. Now Steve wasn’t sure what to do. His Angels Flight pants touched so low to the ground you couldn’t tell if he was wearing shoes or not. “You wouldn’t know it, but underneath these pounds I used to catch a lot of ladies.”, He was sure he was paying a price for all that softness. This is America, he told his parents. They had the coolest toys, the latest gadgets. It was another to know that all this legacy had been washed over by one act. Her job, set down by custom, was to raise her children and tend to her mother-in-law’s mother. “It never ends.”. Her sons didn’t think she could do it. Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. The answer was a simple rub of salt and not trusting the rotisserie to do all the work but raising and lowering the heat and shifting each bird as it cooked. His voice was calm. He was 28 now and knew more about the food operations than any of them. For me, he was the most beautiful guy in the world. “Dad wanted us brothers to love each other and always support each other no matter what. He saw his father lying on the couch, a hat covering his bald head, and his grandmother home from work, walking past him as if he were already dead. The hole-in-the-wall was raking in $2 million a year, half of it pure profit. Many had stuck around for years; only a handful had left disgruntled. Zankou Chicken is a small, family-owned chain of Armenian and Mediterranean fast casual restaurants within the Los Angeles area. Garlic Spread, 1-8 oz. He never said no to anybody. Her prince. “They are making it like I beat her up, but I didn’t. That my father had killed them. This is what my father chose to do as his final deed.”. “I know it sounds stupid, but it wasn’t until I was standing there, staring into their headstones, that it hit me for the first time. 4 in Anaheim and Zankou no. Zankou is always up to par for me. The police had questions, and he tried his best to answer them. If you are trying to destroy an enemy who has hurt you, far better to keep him off guard by feigning friendliness than showing anger…. The gun held 11 rounds, and he scooped up nine extra bullets. Father and son traveled to Hong Kong to explore the trade of men’s suits, then decided the business wasn’t practical. He had no reason to suspect that a dispute over rent with an Armenian tenant, a man connected to a political party, would turn violent. Share recipe using Twitter. Power’s crucial foundation is the ability to master your emotions…. No wonder his mother discounted his vision. He picked a less grimy minimall squeezed behind a gas station for Zankou no. All day long the same movement, his right hand stuffing wads of money into his left shirt pocket and pulling out the change. As he walked down the stairs and said good-bye to Rita, he had no intention of going to Zankou Chicken to see an old friend. Garlic Spread, 1-16 oz. I was not a working woman. ", "TV Producer and Artisanal Grain Guru Marti Noxon Takes THR's Taste Test", "Rob Delaney: Mother. It had been months since he had ventured outside by himself, months since he had driven one of his fancy cars, and she fretted that he was too weak to go anywhere. When he blew the engine, he turned up the next week with a brand-new 442 Olds, this one burgundy. Don’t get me wrong. Right below was Zankou Chicken, the takeout they had named after a river in Armenia. Steve wasn’t so lucky. Five years later, it is still a mystery to me.”. Her prince. The garlic sauce at Zankou, also known as toum (Lebanese garlic sauce), is the stuff of legend. She had no choice but to raise prices, so that a plate of chicken tarna now ran close to $10—the danger zone for fast food. Are they dead, too?”, The cop stared into his eyes and nodded. By car and foot, he logged hundreds of miles that first week, close to a thousand the next. He chatted pleasantly with her for a half hour as he waited for their 76-year-old mother to come home from work. He tweaked the menu; his mother tinkered with the spices. And I didn’t hurt her. He and his Zankous had become part of the map. They packed what they could and went to live at a hotel in Glendale while the house was refurbished. He gave to orphans and widows and soup kitchens back in Armenia. Then, almost in the same instant, it occurred to him to ask the question that he already knew the answer to. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. He saw his father burning the photo and telling him he would never forgive her: “God will forgive the devil before I can forgive my mother. Against the far wall, a Formica table and chairs had been set up gin rummy style. A giant map of Los Angeles, lifted from the pages of a Thomas Guide, shouted a welcome to customers. It turned ugly. Steve became furious with his aunt, Rita’s sister, who worked at the Pasadena Zankou and had complained bitterly about the manager. 10 Unique Fudge Recipes. He had called his sister at work and arranged a meeting with her and his mother to discuss family affairs. Nobody was like him. The sauce used in this meal is the Copycat Zankou… He could see that she had the faintest smile on her lips as she was leaning over to hug him. By the time Steve got home, the lemonade still icy, his father was gone.  She lived in a big house on the other side of the Verdugo Hills with her husband and two sons. He raised the gun and waited long enough to hear her plead for her life. Turn to any page, and you had the landscape of L.A. in bird’s-eye: parks in green, malls in yellow, cemeteries in olive, and freeways, the lifeblood, in red. There are 522 calories in Zankou Chicken: Calorie break-down: 53% fat, 19% carbs, 28% protein (per meal) “No, Dad,” he shouted. The magic was in his mother’s right hand. Their wedding came amid the fierce fighting of Lebanon’s civil war . Food is always spot on, I've tried other Mediterranean places and there always one thing off. In Los Angeles, Strip Mall Food Is Way Cool", "Palestinian Chicken Conflict: Only in Curb Your Enthusiasm or Is It Real? “It was a drive-thru before there were drive-thrus,” recalled Garo Dekirmendjian, a Beiruti Armenian who befriended the family. After so many years playing the pampered son, Mardiros now saw himself as the patriarch, a role that became official after his father’s death. Pour a light layer of oil onto garlic. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. Then came Zankou no. In the end, her parents knew they were deeply in love. How could a woman who cooked with such love disown her son on his deathbed? “Yes, they’re dead, too.”. [5][8] (The original location and Montebello locations are not listed on the website; Rita Iskenderian owns the website and doesn't include them.)[9]. They were questions, he now knew, that had no answers. [5] He could take one bite of food and know immediately which spice was too much or too little. “Everybody thinks we are making millions,” she said. He seemed, in a fundamental way, far too sweet a kid to become truly adept in the art of ruthlessness. On January 14, 2003, after a heated argument, Zankou Chicken owner Mardiros Iskenderian shot and killed his sister, Dzovig Marjik, and his mother Margarit Iskenderian; he then took his own life in a double-murder suicide. Copy and share the recipe … Time to continue his education on the balcony, she blurted out in Armenian: “Your sons had forbidden from. His bladder had spread to his parents and two from Armenia, sat all day performing kind. Be stored in your browser only with your consent moved in with Dzovig menus to,! 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