Work through the list in order. Hide the notes when you know what to do.
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Eat khorovats
Large pieces of pork or lamb over vine-wood coals, barely marinated: salt, pepper and onion only. Served on lavash, which catches the juices.
Vegetables go onto the same coals and are then mashed into a smoky spread with garlic and herbs. The vine wood is not for show: its smoke is noticeably different from ordinary charcoal.
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Try tolma
Vine leaves stuffed with mince and rice, served with garlic matsun. Fresh leaves in summer, brined in winter; the fasting version with lentils and grain is a dish of its own.
Pasuts tolma is the fasting version, made with cabbage leaves, beans and grain and served cold. Garlic matsun is essential and holds the dish together.
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Try khash at dawn
A thick white broth of beef trotters, eaten early in the morning with crushed garlic, salt and dried lavash. Winter food and the occasion for a long meal.
Khash houses run from six to eleven and then close. Salt and garlic are not cooked into the broth; you add them to your own bowl.
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Try zhingyalov hats
A thin flatbread packed with twenty kinds of wild greens and cooked on a dry griddle. A Karabakh dish, entirely plant-based and genuinely herbal.
There should be enough greens for the bread to look green through the dough. In spring there are more herbs and the flavour is markedly brighter.
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Get lavash from the tonir
Thin unleavened bread baked on the wall of an earth oven in half a minute. Fresh, it is soft and pliable; dried, it keeps for months and is sprinkled with water before use.
Wrap lori or chanakh cheese and herbs in it for the basic Armenian snack. You can watch a tonir working in villages and in a few Yerevan restaurants.
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Try spas
A soup made on matsun with dzavar wheat and dried mint, stirred constantly while it cooks. Eaten hot in winter and cold in summer.
The matsun splits if you stop stirring, which is why it has a reputation for being temperamental. The mint is dried rather than fresh, and that matters.
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Try ghapama
A whole pumpkin baked with rice, dried fruit, nuts and honey, cut open at the table. A celebratory dish, mostly autumn and winter.
Order it ahead: it takes a long time and is not on every kitchen's daily list. The sweet and savoury combination is deliberate.
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Try harissa porridge
Wheat cooked down with chicken into a smooth, sticky mass and finished with butter. A ritual dish, made in a communal cauldron on feast days.
Not to be confused with the hot North African paste of the same name; they are unrelated. The texture should be uniform, with no grains visible.
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Try Echmiadzin kyufta
A large ball of beef beaten to a paste, boiled and served with melted butter. The meat is worked for hours, which makes the texture springy and light.
It is made for celebrations and in specialist places rather than every day. It comes hot and is cut into pieces on the platter.
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Try basturma and sujukh
Air-dried beef coated in chaman, a fenugreek, garlic and paprika paste, and the dense sujukh sausage. Sliced thin and eaten with lavash and herbs.
The chaman coating is pungent and aromatic and is not scraped off; the flavour lives there. It is sold by weight at markets, where tasting is expected.
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Try gata Desserts and pastries
A layered pastry with a khoriz filling of flour, sugar and butter, marked with a pattern on top. Every region makes it differently, and the differences show.
The gata sold by the Garni and Geghard monasteries is considered the benchmark. The filling is dry and crumbly rather than creamy.
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Try sweet sujukh and alani Desserts and pastries
Sweet sujukh is walnuts on a thread dipped in thickened grape juice; alani is a dried peach stuffed with ground walnut and sugar. Both are made without colouring and with little added sugar.
Fresh sweet sujukh is soft and slightly tacky; rock hard means last season. Alani is made from whole stoned peaches dried in one piece.
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Buy apricots and dried fruit Desserts and pastries
The apricot is a national symbol here, and its season is June and July. Out of season, take dried apricots, dried peach, figs and fruit-purée sheets.
At the GUM market tasting everything is standard practice. Sugar-free fruit leather is the best edible souvenir to take home.
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Drink tan Non-alcoholic drinks
Diluted salted matsun, the fermented milk drink that goes with meat and against the heat. Thicker and sharper than ayran.
With khorovats it is the best drink there is: the acidity cuts the fat. Homemade tan is thicker than the shop version and often has herbs in it.
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Drink Armenian coffee Non-alcoholic drinks
Finely ground coffee brewed in a jezve and served with the grounds settled at the bottom. Sweetness is stated when ordering and cannot be changed later.
The grounds are neither stirred nor drunk; people also read fortunes in them. A glass of cold water comes alongside and is drunk before the coffee, not after.
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Try apricot spirit and brandy Local alcohol
A spirit distilled from apricot or cornelian cherry: fruity, strong and unsweetened, plus long-aged Armenian brandy. Drunk in small glasses with food.
A good fruit spirit smells of fruit rather than alcohol, and that is the test. Toasts follow an order, and drinking between them is not done.
