The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [73]
This wasn’t Beirut. Mardiros put in long hours. He tweaked the menu; his mother tinkered with the spices. It took a full year to find a groove. The first crowd of regulars brought in a second crowd, and a buzz began to grow among the network of foodies. How did they make the chicken so tender and juicy? The answer was a simple rub of salt and not trusting the rotisserie to do all the work but raising and lowering the heat and shifting each bird as it cooked. What made the garlic paste so fluffy and white and piercing? This was a secret the family intended to keep. Some customers swore it was potatoes, others mayonnaise. At least one fanatic stuck his container in the freezer and examined each part as it congealed. He pronounced the secret ingredient a special kind of olive oil. None guessed right. The ingredients were simple and fresh, Mardiros pledged, no shortcuts. The magic was in his mother’s right hand.
Word of a new kind of fare, fast and tasty and light, spread to the critics. The L.A. Times would call it “the best roast chicken in town at any price.” Zagat would anoint Zankou one of “America’s best meal deals.” No one, though, was more breathless in his praise than the guerrilla warrior of city chowhounds. Jonathan Gold called the chicken “superb,” and nothing in heaven or on earth compared with the garlic paste.
The hole-in-the-wall was raking in $2 million a year, half of it pure profit. In Mardiros’s mind, the family was growing and the business needed to grow with it. This is America, he told his parents. We’ve got something good. Let’s duplicate our success. His parents fought expansion, but he kept pushing, and in 1991 the family agreed to a split. Mardiros would take the Zankou concept and build a chain across the region. Any new restaurants he opened, success or failure, would belong to him. In return, he would sign over his stake in Hollywood to his parents and two sisters. The split was hardly a parting. The garlic paste still would be prepared by his mother and used by all the Zankous. As a favor to his sister Dzovig, he would pay her to manage some of his new stores. Nothing, he assured them, would change at home.
After so many years playing the pampered son, Mardiros now saw himself as the patriarch, a role that became official after his father’s death. Over and over, he preached: Success means nothing if we don’t stay as one. Greed must never rear its head. There is plenty for all of us. He loved Dzovig’s two boys as he loved his own, and he knew she felt the same way about his sons. The boys were more like brothers than cousins. They lived only a few minutes apart in Glendale and attended the same private Armenian school. Dzovig would take them each morning, and Rita would pick them up. A gang of six, they climbed the hills, rode bikes, played video games. They had the coolest toys, the latest gadgets. If they were spoiled, and they were, it came with the turf. As the grandchildren of Margrit, each one was something of a food snob. No one’s cooking could measure up to hers. She made the best lentil soups, the best raw-meat-and-bulgur chekufta. She wasn’t big on hugs or kisses; she could be downright stern, but she wanted her grandchildren to know what good food tasted like. When they turned up their noses at her sheep’s brain soup, she bribed them with $20 bills just to get them to take one sip.
Mardiros didn’t need to travel far to find his next spot. Glendale was a city made new by three successive waves of Armenian refugees, first from Iran, then from Beirut, and now from Armenia itself. He picked a less grimy minimall squeezed behind a gas station