The Taste of What Doesn’t Exist
by Lucía Cholakian Herrera
Illustrations by Milagros Brasco
I learned what Aintab was a few years ago during an afternoon at my family’s house when I bit into a sarma and was stunned into silence. My father immediately mended what I was struggling to stitch together: yes, the sarma from Aramé, an Armenian shop in the neighborhood of Olivos, tastes the same as my grandmother’s sarma. “They are from Aintab, too”, my dad remarked. I had vague references of the place my great grandparents came from nearly 100 years ago, but I had no idea that that origin had its own rules of flavor. Thinking about it more deeply, I equated it to the styles of empanadas throughout Northwest Argentina. I don’t think that a foreigner could distinguish the difference between a tucumana and a salteña, but as a local, failure to do so comes at the risk of getting canceled.
If you google Aintab, the first result that pops up is a Wikipedia page for Gaziantep, an enormous city in the south of Turkey near the border of Syria and very close to Aleppo. With a little bit of patience, zoom out on the map and you will find Armenia. The capital Yerevan is 232 kilometers to the northeast: a distance that seems small to a porteña, a weekend escape, but within the dimensions of the region the distance is considerable. The Wikipedia introduction proclaims: “The Arabs, Seljuks and Ottomans knew the city as Aintab or Aïntab. The Turkish Parliament bestowed it the title of Gazi, or victorious warrior, on February 8, 1921.” A few more clicks will lead you to this article, written by Armenians, that tells another story: February 8, 1921, was the final battle waged by the Armenians of Aintab after ten months of conflict, an epopee that culminated in the Turkish victory and meant the displacement of the Armenians of Aintab, their home, and the end of the existence of that territory as their own.
My great-grandfather Ohannes Haleblián left a letter behind. A story about his arrival in Buenos Aires in 1923. He was amongst the Aintabian refugees. The stories that I know about him include months walking through the desert; subjugated by the Turkish and other tragedies that I won’t repeat. The article talks about why we came to Argentina, describing an arrival to a cold and wet port. Hungry with no one to turn to and without a coin in their pocket, they encountered a heartbreaking scene: he and his family were rejected by the Hotel of Immigrants (editor’s note: the Hotel de Inmigrantes was a State-run hotel that offered temporary housing for immigrants) because Argentina did not have an agreement with ‘his government’: Turkey. His story was unlike those of so many Buenos Aires families of Italian and Spanish descent, who refer to their first step on this land remembering the warm embrace their ancestors received from the same hotel.
We recently found my great-grandfather’s passport while cleaning out my grandfather’s house and it said just that: Ohannes was Turkish. So was his wife and the children that arrived with him in Argentina despite feeling anything but that. And so the violence continues. Around the globe, only a little more than 20 countries recognize the Armenian genocide. The writer Ana Arzoumanian writes: “as long as there is no ruling on the genocide we are talking about a chronic crime … without judgment the crime never ceases.”
When I arrived to eat at Aintab Dun (or the House of Aintab) a few weeks ago, I introduced myself as Lucía Cholakian and immediately the questions began: daughter of which Cholakian? Granddaughter of which Cholakian? Niece of which Cholakian? There aren’t many of us but my family dispersed and I have an aunt who is an illustrious member of the Armenian community and appears to be friends with everyone. There is also a Cholakian furniture factory owned by a second cousin who owns an elegant building on Avenida Libertador. But I am from the brand of Cholakians porteñizados, the kind that doesn’t participate in the community, the kind that can barely pronounce the names of different dishes. We are the Cholakians of asado, football and Peronism: inescapably Armenian in appearance, decidedly Argentine in character. But one never escapes their last name.
The social world that I circulated in when I began to make my own life in Buenos Aires was always roughly divided into three groups: the descendants of Italians, the descendants of Spaniards and the descendants of Jews. Nearly all of my friends come from one or the other, some more noticeably so. I am half Armenian and my last name screams it at the top of its lungs. Neither Italian nor Spanish. A strange last name, zero glamour, no foreign passport to chase after. But there is no denying that when I mention the origin of my last name (which generally happens right after I spell it out, something I am asked to do frequently) that the response is almost always some allusion to food. That is where I feel like the most sophisticated one in the group. Armenian food is alchemy and tenacity and is the only thread that connects me to my family's origin.
Armenian restaurants generally work with few ingredients: meat (lamb, ideally), bulgar, bell peppers, onions, white flour, grains and fat (whatever you have on hand but here we tend to use butter). Yet the Armenian menu for dummies is enormous: shish and lahmacun, autonomous dishes eaten with your hands, and more elaborate plates, like kofta, which look like simple soups or stews but hide flavors that border on the lysergic. I think there is an Armenian dish for every person that I love because, truly, there is something for everyone.
To attend a lunch or dinner at Aintab Dun is to do an immersion in Armenian cooking and the peculiarities of Aintabian flavors. Zeda, of Syrian and Aintabian descent, has led the kitchen for the last ten years and works from the early hours to prepare each and every plate. She is hard of hearing and most of her responses are in Armenian. She does everything using her hands with an almost extraterrestrial command: they move quickly, absent of algorithms and without error. Everything goes where it needs to, every single dish is meticulously plated, everything the exact same size. Zeda’s arms dance around like an octopus from one plate to another, checking off the herbs and spices that most often appear: paprika, cumin, crushed red pepper, black pepper, lots of mint.
For the appetizer, she puts together small plates with bulgur wheat and bell pepper that she scoops out of an enormous pot, mouthfuls of green pea puree, hummus, a plate of olives, bastermá and feta, and the always polemic chi kofte, which is nothing more and nothing less than very finely ground raw meat mixed with onion and bell pepper, also raw. (A digression: I am a very picky person when it comes to cooking meat and am the one at the asado that is always bothering the griller to leave my meat on the barbecue a little longer. But there is something about the chi kofte that shuts something off, or maybe, turns on: I forget all my tics and I stuff my mouth with raw meat, unbothered by the image that I am biting into an animal sitting on my plate).
Going out to eat Armenian food in Argentina is more often akin to a wedding or a quinceñera than a restaurant. Usually, it means getting together at a house or a little dive and the meal is organized the way food is always organized in Armenian culture: one woman accompanied by various assistants working in silence without missing a beat. Aintab Dun belongs to the Patriotic Union of Armenians from Aintab, or Unión Patriótica de Armenios de Aintab. Its President, Orlando Ibichian, explained that before the pandemic they organized dinners every Thursday, the tables were long and everything was shared. The diners all ate together. COVID separated the tables, although a sense of community can still be felt between each dish when diners, especially men—who without fail always remind me of my grandfather Armen—head to the patio to smoke and chat.
When you feel like you can barely eat any more the main dish arrives. The main changes every week and the Saturday that I visited it was köfte iaghené (Editor’s note: iaghené means ‘butter’ in Turkish; it is also known as küfteli yahni or, in the Aintabian dialect, küfteyajënë). According to Orlando and Zeda, the dish is 100% Aintabian and impossible to find on the menu of any other Armenian restaurant. It’s a soup made with chicken broth and small meatballs prepared with ground beef and bulgur wheat stuffed with butter and walnut. Yogurt is spread over the broth and the flavor is celestial: the acidic yogurt hugged by the warm broth, the explosion of butter inside the delicate meatball, the surprise of walnuts.
Just like the sarma from Aramé, trying the köfte iaghené at Aintab Dun was a journey except this time the flavor brought back a familiar call: the sound of my grandmother’s shrill voice calling me Luuuuu-lii everytime that she described a recipe to me over Whatsapp. Luuuu-liii, the meat has to be ground very very fine, she told me years ago when I asked her how to make a köfte soup (the name I always knew). It came out perfectly. I spent hours in the kitchen with my sister and the work was worth it in the end but I never made it again.
The memory was interrupted by a hand on my shoulder. Orlando came to my table while he rallied the tables in the back. I thought that it was time for a coffee but quickly remembered that the coffee never arrived at my grandparents’ table as I predicted. With his eyes shining bright with food adrenaline, my grandpa Armen always doubled down on the bet. Maybe it’s in our genes because Orlando asked us to get up out of our seats and follow him. The parade of people filed off to a room near the entrance where the next dish was cooking: shish kebab over a wood fire. “This is the only place you will see something like this. Take pictures!” he said, surrounded by his people. Everyone took photos. I tried to gather my courage to keep going.
My generation is already 100% Argentine. In my family, we accept our Argentinity with pride. The older ones had a harder time assimilating themselves, mostly because of language and customs, but that too has been left behind.
All of my childhood memories are immersed in the time I spent in the kitchen with my parents, especially with my father. The apron tied around his back, his hands cutting something, his arms traveling from pot to pan. A copy of my grandmother, who cooked until she was too tired to cook anymore. The laboriousness of Armenian food is part of its flavor. There is something that lives on in the hunger of these hands, in the future’s promise, in communion that also cooks during the hours of chopping vegetables on a cutting board all the way to the crack of a walnut, that binds everything together, and I think that maybe that is the land that we still hold on to, this is our little Aintab. The shape that we have taken today as Argentines descended from Armenians. The most interesting, the most intimate, the most delicious.
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The text was translated from Spanish with the guidance of the author. Minor changes were made for readability and context.
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Lucía Cholakian Herrera. Freelance journalist, podcast scriptwriter, lover of food. She lives in Buenos Aires with a writer and a cat. You can find her work here.
Milagros Brascó. Illustrator and graphic designer. Her work generally gravitates to gastronomy. She was raised and has worked in many restaurants and studied to be a sommelier. You can find her on Instagram.