Uncle Meat

Near the center of Armenian Hollywood, not far from Bezjian’s Market and around the corner from the Lebanese-Armenian restaurant Marouch, is the Armenian bakery called Uncle Jack’s Meat Pies, which is an East Hollywood monument to the greatness of “Armenian pizza,” lahmajune .

It’s hard to mistake Uncle Jack’s specialty. The word lahmajune beams from every side of his building in giant, red block letters; also found are the slogans “1 Meat Pie” and “42 Years of Experience.”

My first experience with Uncle Jack’s was a couple of years ago, late at night, when I’d parked near the bakery on a visit to Marouch. A man, probably Uncle Jack himself, popped out of the shadows and walked up to me.

“You want meat pies?” he asked. “ Lahmajune ? Or maybe the zaatar bread? I am sorry, we are closed, but it is possible for me to unlock the door. Or would you like to come back tomorrow morning, when the meat pies will be hot?”

I hated to admit that I was in the mood for barbecued quail instead, but I made my apologies and scooted on around the corner to Marouch. The quail was very fine.

Later I finally made it into Uncle Jack’s, whose small shop was stacked floor to ceiling with things like long-handled Armenian coffeepots, Romanian demitasse cups and plaster statues of surfing chimpanzees. Tray after tray of lahmajune cooled behind the counter, and there was a line of people, most buying bulging grocery-sacksful at a time, some chatting while contemplatively munching on the goods. I bought a half-dozen hot lahmajune and a stack of zaatar bread--pretty much all Uncle Jack’s sells--and I took them out to the car. My first Uncle Jack’s meal was consummated a few miles away, in the auto-registration line of the Hollywood DMV.

Uncle Jack’s lahmajune are wafer-thin round things, about the diameter of a hand-patted corn tortilla, smeared with a few grams of a garlicky tomato-meat stew. The edges of the pie are baked slightly burnt and crisp, with a faint matzoh-like flavor. The stew is spiked with still-crisp bits of green pepper and onion, and has a clean taste of fresh vegetables. There’s a wholesome, handmade quality to them, like something that somebody’s mom could be famous for whipping up for PTA meetings. And at 50 cents a shot, Uncle Jack’s lahmajune makes about the cheapest lunch you can imagine. Two will do it.

Zaatar bread, also known as manaesh , is more of a pizza sort of deal, bubbly, thick round crusts spread with a lemon-tart mixture of thyme and ground sumac berries, dusted with sesame seeds, chewy and crunchy as a good bagel, pungent with a spice fragrance unique to the Middle East. Armenians usually eat zaatar bread for breakfast, and in the Arab world it is customarily eaten as a snack. The bread tastes especially good with coffee.

Last week, wondering if Uncle Jack’s was indeed the standard for meat pies and zaatar bread, I took a tour of some Hollywood Armenian bakeries, picking up a dozen or so at each one and bringing it back to the office for a blind comparative tasting. The controls, commercial jobs I bought from the deli counter at Ron’s supermarket, looked too weird to actually take out of the package; the lahmajune from Arax had a nice flavor of herbs, but were a little pasty and the tomato-meat mixture seemed somewhat overcooked. International’s lahmajune were about the same, though a few here liked its zaatar bread a lot. Sasoun, which is considered one of the best Armenian bakeries in town, impressed some people with the red-pepper glow and the liberal use of garlic in its lahmajune ; its zaatar bread, intensely sour with sumac and savory with thyme, was very good, though the crust was a bit soft and pale.

Anyway, the tasting pretty much unanimously confirmed both Uncle Jack’s lahmajune and his zaatar bread as best of show: crispness, consistency and complexity of flavor win out every time. Like the guy says . . . No. 1 meat pie.

Uncle Jack’s Meat Pies, 1108 N. Kenmore St., Hollywood, (213) 664-8842. Open Monday-Saturday 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Takeout only. Cash only. Lahmajune, 50 cents apiece, manaish, 50 cents apiece.