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Published: September 30th 2017
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Geo: 40.5475, 44.9557
The concept of a secret restaurant - it sounds like a viral marketing campaign straight out of the Twitterverse, something that is definitely plausible in this day and age of pop up restaurants. But tonight's dinner at a secret location didn't quite come about in that manner, though its origins did lie in the big bad world of the Internet. It wasn't me that discovered the place, but Ivan, a fellow traveler from Milan.
I really don't know how he managed to hear about this place, even though he claimed to have found it on TripAdvisor. My subsequent Internet searches yielded nothing, so I suspect finding a restaurant this hidden and this good could only have been accomplished through connections to an Armenian secret society, or by overhearing talk of the place in hushed tones at a bar run by the local mafia.
Our mission was simple this evening - find and infiltrate this secret restaurant and have a killer Armenian meal, without being robbed and/or murdered. Sounds simple enough, but you would be surprised at how difficult this task could be, especially given the rather dodgy instructions that Ivan had found online. It was like a mission presented to
Sevanavank Monastery ...
... overlooking Lake Sevan. Too bad we didn't have time to actually take a dip in the lake today! However, it was nice to at least escape from Yerevan's oppressive heat to this cool little spot - it was only 33 C, and not 38 C. I'm not even kidding, that made a huge difference! Ethan Hunt by Jim Phelps, but instead of Jon Voigt, it was some random Finnish guy giving us directions in the form of an online review.
"Enter the brick archway located between 35 and 37 Tumanyan street. Take a right at the second intersection, and continue walking through the dark alley until you reach a gate with grape vines growing overhead. Enter the gate, and take a right - the restaurant will be on your left after a few metres." WTF have we gotten ourselves into? We would surely be killed, walking these deserted and dimly-lit backstreets, ones surely controlled and monitored by the mafia!
This was the perfect criminal ploy - post a fake online restaurant review to lure tourists here so that they can be robbed, beaten, non-critical organs removed and sold, and then condemned to a life of sexual slavery working in a San Fransisco massage parlour. This kind of shit happens all the time, I've seen it on Dateline NBC!!! Luckily for us, we managed to find the place without incident, even though we passed an oddly fancy building in the back alley, which was surely a high-end brothel where we would've received a crash course
Used to Be An Island, Now a Peninsula ...
... Sevanavank used to be on an island, until Stalin started draining the lake, turning it into a peninsula. in administering the erotic arts to Eurasian criminals.
But it wasn't until we were seated that we actually knew we had found the place - the empty swimming pool right next to us kind of threw us off the trail, after all. Our best guess is that it's some sort of guesthouse that also serves meals, since the table next to us was filled with a French family dining with some locals - that's probably the typical way that you would hear about this place, through a local connection. Never in a million years would we have come across this place without that sketchy online review, but we were certainly grateful that we did, because the food was worth the effort, excellently-prepared traditional Armenian food.
Ordering was definitely a struggle, even though the menu was offered in English - unfortunately, the translations weren't quite complete, so the waitress (and perhaps proprietor?) managed to communicate to us that lamb was available this evening, by making a baaaaa noise, which we accepted by also making a baaaaa noise. It was quite entertaining how she kept yelling "Mag?!!? Magda!!!??!?" to the chef, checking to make sure that what we ordered was available.
Eventually, we
made our wishes known and ended up having a fantastic meal, completely satiated by the food, and also feeling quite proud of ourselves, having dined at this rather esoteric no-name restaurant. Even looking at the menu or the bill offered no clues as to what the name of the place was - perhaps we'll just call it Magda's Secret, in honour of the excellent chef?
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