Cafe Armenia. I’ve lived in and around Carnegie for upwards of ten years, and for much of that time I’ve joked about eating at the Cafe Armenia. Well on Friday we finally did it. I had no idea what to expect — there’s only so much you can glean from cowardly peering at the menu in the window.

Ordering some soup and a barbecued lamb dish, we were given some tomatoey-garlicy dip (very garlicy actually, the smell on the breath lingered well into the next day) and some bread. Shortly afterwards the old Armenian bloke gave us a dish of chilli, cabbage and pickles, proclaiming the chilli suitable for male consumption only. And I’ll tell you, it was hot. A kind of hot that kept on giving.

The soup arrived, bubbling away in a huge clay pot thing. Perhaps more of a broth, with lamb and potato and chickpea, it was utterly delicious. We both tucked-in and barely got through half of it before the lamb arrived. The Armenian bloke used some bread to pull the lamb off the skewer. It was incredibly succulent, and I hesitate to use the word delicious again in the one paragraph, but that’s the only suitable description. So too were the accompanying potatoes, quite possibly the finest potatoes ever seen on this planet.

As we staggered out into the cold Friday air, full to the brim with good food, the main thing on my mind was me wondering why on earth it had taken so long to go and eat there.

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