Karen Kilgariff
speaker
3,962 appearances
39 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 8 Jun
Karen Kilgariff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But the story behind it is kind of fascinating because it's like, so in Los Angeles, there's a city that's right behind the hill that says Hollywood on it, right behind that city. is both Burbank and Glendale. I mean, right behind that mountain is Burbank and Glendale. And Glendale has the single largest population of Armenian people that isn't Armenia in the world. Wow. It's huge.
And Armenians came there after they were there was the Turkish genocide, which there we see parades about and and flags about. And it's like it's weird because I never heard of anybody being Armenian until I moved to L.A. And now I feel like I know a ton of stuff about the Armenian culture simply because like I live in Burbank, I live close to Glendale. Yeah.
So anyway, this is, this, um, restaurant Zancou chicken was started originally in Beirut, Lebanon by a man named, uh, Vart. Oh, and the pronunciation on this is going to, if you're Armenian or if you're just not, uh, a Valley girl, it's going to offend you. Uh, Vartkis Iskandarian and his family started the first Zancou chicken in Beirut in 1962. Oh, wow. And, um,
Then they brought it over here in 1983. And it was... The chain actually was opened by Marderos, who is the son. And his parents were not interested in having a restaurant in America. They wanted to do dry cleaning, maybe go into the suit business. They looked into all these other businesses that were more kind of reliable than a restaurant. But...
uh, Marderos believed that this, he looked around and he saw how few, um, Middle Eastern restaurants there were with so, with such huge populations of people that would appreciate the food. There was almost no food to feed them. That was like from their home. Totally. Um, so they opened their first restaurant, um, at the corner of sunset and Normandy, um, in East, uh, East LA. Hello. Hey. And, um,
The LA Times said it's the best roast chicken in town at any price, which is kind of really saying something for the old she-she restaurants they have here. The Zagat Guide would say that Zanku was one of America's best meal deals.
America, not just LA, which is cool. Jonathan Gold, who's a very famous food writer, he adores Zancou chicken, reviewed it and said the chicken was superb and nothing in heaven or on earth compares with the garlic paste. Oh my God, that garlic paste. The garlic paste is what everybody talks about. And it was invented by Marderos' grandmother. Shut up. Shut up.
And his mother makes it, made it all by hand. So it was a secret recipe. People still don't know what's in it. It's this white paste that you get with your chicken and your rice and your hummus and your pita. It's this little tub. It's like on the side. And it is.
tangy and pungent and garlicky but there's something else going on it's kind of like butter like you can't figure out all you want to do is eat it and put everything that you eat into it then for the next day you're belching garlic yes it's like filled with garlic you reek of it's it's quite an experience yes So that was kind of their secret weapon.
Aside from the fact that they figured out that other rotisserie chicken places, they realized you have to move the chicken itself and you have to play with the temperatures. You can't just keep it on one temperature all the time.
So they basically kind of went in there and tried to figure out how to give people who wanted to eat authentic Middle Eastern food, the best version of that food and not just go like here, here's whatever. Which is amazing. Apparently one time on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David referred to it as chicken so good it could end the rift in the Middle East.
So like everybody in LA knows about this food. It was also in a Beck song. That's right. That's right. There's a list on Wikipedia of all the popular culture things. There was somebody on Buffy the Vampire Slayer also liked to eat there. So they started as this hole in the wall chicken place. And after, I would think like over two years, they were making $2 million a year. Holy shit.
And half of that was pure profit. Wow.
So they were doing, obviously, great. So there were rumors. Oh, so in this article, this is one of my favorite things. In this article, this guy, Mark, the writer, starts out by talking about the Armenian culture and everything. And he says there's a saying that little old Armenian ladies say in Armenian, which is, let's sit crooked and talk straight, which totally made me think of us. Oh, my God.
Isn't that the best? Let's sit crooked and talk straight. That's basically let's gossip.
It's the best. So, of course, in the Armenian, I keep saying culture, but what I mean is community. They This family rose to prominence, obviously, because they all of a sudden started making tons of money and their food was crazy popular. But they also were huge philanthropists and gave so much back. So they were kind of famous within that community because they were a huge part of it.
So there was gossip. It was never confirmed that Pepsi was offering the company $30 million for the chain and the trademark. Holy shit. Um, and this was when it was kind of like peaking in, in its popularity. Um, and at that same time, even though, uh, Medeiros's, uh, parents did not want to expand. They just wanted to keep that one.
Um, he was like, we, he kept fighting to expand. He's like, we have to do it. We have to do it. So finally they agreed to split. And what they agreed to do was, um, I think it's Medeiros, uh,
sorry if I'm, I know I'm pronouncing his name wrong, but they agreed that, that he would take the concept and he would build the chain and any stores that he opened, um, doing that, whether they failed or succeeded would be on him. Um, cause that's basically what the family was afraid. Don't, don't, let's not lose all our money. We got a good thing. Let's just keep this good thing going.
And in return, he would sign over his stake of the original in Hollywood and to his parents and his two sisters, but they weren't splitting. It wasn't, they weren't, they weren't, you know, it was, they were still completely together as a family. The garlic paste was still made by his mother at all the Zancou's, which I just can't get over is this woman who was probably at the time in her
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