“This place used to be empty,” says Mariam Saghatelyan. Steeled against the November night, with her hands in her jacket pockets, she nods at the fully booked restaurants, bustling wine bars and specialty coffee shops lining Saryan Street.
When Saghatelyan co-founded In Vino—Yerevan’s first wine bar—in 2012, the area was quiet and unremarkable. Now, she says, it’s colloquially called “wine street.”
In the downtown core, a destination once known for Soviet-era brutalism and chiseled stone blocks hums with energy and elegance.
Standing outside In Vino, where Saghatelyan has just poured me a half dozen Armenian wines—a crisp white made from late-ripening Garan Dmak grapes, a punchy orange Vosekhat wine aged in clay amphoras, a velvety red Areni—it’s hard to picture the city any other way. Yet barely three decades ago, Yerevan was one of the harshest places on Earth.
On my first night in the city, Hrachya Aghajanyan, a former diplomat and the driving force behind several ambitious development projects, pointed to the trees above us on Abovyan Street.
“These are all new,” he said. Between 1992 and 1995, blockaded by Turkey and Azerbaijan, Armenia had power for just one or two hours per day, if at all. Basic consumer goods were practically nonexistent.
“Back then, people chopped down all the trees in Yerevan to use for energy. They even stripped the park benches,” Aghajanyan explained.
This period, known as the “dark and cold” years, is alive in the collective memory. But rather than dwell in the darkness of times gone by, young Armenians seem hell-bent on using it to fuel the future they want to have.
Saghatelyan, for one, is a certified sommelier born in California to Armenian parents. She chose to live in Yerevan, a city where locals initially furrowed their brows at a bar like In Vino, rather than pursue a career in Napa Valley.
“When we opened, people were confused,” she explains, swirling a white Voskheni wine in her glass. “They would walk in, look at the wall and say, ‘No vodka?’ Then leave.”
Armenia has a 6,000-year history of winemaking. If you believe in the legend, Noah planted grapevines on Mt. Ararat after the biblical floods.
But in the 20th century, Soviet leaders assigned Armenia the role of producing brandy for the bloc, and its postdiluvian winemaking legacy nearly disappeared.
Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, grapevines were often replaced with wheat and vegetable crops, and winemaking went from a cultural marker to a fringe practice.
“When we opened, there were maybe 10 drinkable Armenian wines—and I mean drinkable in the loosest sense of the word,” Saghatelyan tells me. “Now we have more than 600 in our shop.”
The modern-day wine revival is just one part of Yerevan’s evolution. Despite hiccups, the city’s food and nightlife are surging.
At Mov, a blue-walled hotspot in a 200-year-old former medical center and trade building, chef Davit Poghosyan has built a menu around creative dolmas (stuffed grape leaves).
For some, he combed through old recipes, including a few enshrined in the Matenadaran, the city’s manuscript museum.
For others, he added his touches, incorporating kimchi, duck breast or sturgeon with dill oil, all somewhat radical departures from tradition. He complements these dolmas with reimagined Armenian classics, from wild sorrel with an earthy walnut vinaigrette to spiced beef kofta plated with tomato-laced faro. It’s a delicious tribute to Armenian cooking, past and present.
Poghosyan’s success is no small feat. Societies with ancient roots can easily become bound to their traditions, unable to innovate for fear of undermining them. But there seems to be no such apprehension in Yerevan today.
The project is the brainchild of Artak Harutyunyan, a young restaurateur who seems to have spared no expense to develop a distinctly modernized industry in one of the world’s oldest inhabited cities. You could argue he and his business partners have done more to turbocharge the growth of Yerevan’s food and drinks scene than anyone else.
Over lunch at one of his other restaurants, chic all-day dining venue Black Angus Signature, he quietly mentions the Cees Braakman chairs and Flos lamps before leading me to an open kitchen in the basement, highlighting the hand-laid Mutina tile mosaics.
“This floor will outlast us all,” Harutyunyan tells me with a laugh, explaining that this basement space is where Yerevan VIPs like to lounge.
For as much as the restaurant’s pop art-meets-Nordic design speaks to Harutyunyan’s pursuit of refinement, the menu drives it home. True to its name, you’ll find steaks and burgers made from grass-fed beef, but Harutyunyan has aspired to do something greater. Dishes like seabass ceviche with kumquat and mango, yuzu-avocado gazpacho with feta and prawns, and king crab brioche rolls speak to an ambition to satisfy an evolving palate.
Armenia occupies a unique place in the world. It sits in Europe’s backyard, but it’s also hemmed in by two openly hostile neighbors in Turkey and Azerbaijan. A small corridor connects the country to its one true partner, Iran, a pariah to many nations in the West.
It’s one of the world’s oldest societies, but for 700 years, it didn’t exist. It was a flame carried within a people. For two millennia, it rose and fell and rose again. Since its independence in 1991, Armenia’s back has been routinely pressed against the wall.
It’s remarkable, then, to see Yerevan thriving.
After a dinner gala, I joined a trio of new friends for drinks at Bar Phoenix. Located within a historic building on Abovyan Street, the bar serves a selection of cocktails made with Ararat Brandy, which might be Armenia’s national beverage. (One floor above, the eclectic Bird Cage embraces a French Polynesian aesthetic, serving drinks with a dash of whimsy.)
As I nursed a cocktail made with cherry brandy, fig liqueur, Campari and bitters, I watched bartenders shaking and stirring drinks beneath a spotlit phoenix mosaic. It represents the bar’s emergence from a fire in 2019, but it was impossible to resist its broader symbolism.
Yerevan is a place that has risen from the ashes of history time and again. When the city comes out to eat, drink and play, the flames of the past feel like a distant memory.