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Food

The Secret Ingredient in Larry David’s Favorite Chicken Is Murder

Sliding into a tub of garlic paste, matricide, and Curb Your Enthusiasm at Zankou, the best roast-chicken joint in LA.
Illustration by James Braithwaite

FAT TV is a bi-monthly column about the intersection of food and television, with words by Richard Parks and illustrations by James Braithwaite.

I could practically bathe in the garlic paste from Zankou Chicken.

By that, I mean—practically speaking, at least—it could work. The bright white condiment, which is approximately the color of Elmer's Glue, has the texture, according to maestro Jonathan Gold, "of puréed horseradish." So I imagine that, if I was able to collect enough 2 oz. plastic to-go cups of the heavenly raw garlic mash to fill a deep porcelain tub, the sensation of sliding in would be vaguely analogous to what you get at a high-end mud bath joint. The difference from the spa experience probably being that an hour spent soaking in that soup would be liable to obliterate one's sense of smell entirely.

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Forgive me for playing that fantasy out to its natural end—I've caught myself dreaming about it more than a time or two! And a recurring bathtub dream is a good indicator of just how fierce my adoration of that heavenly white paste is, as well as how I feel generally about Zankou, LA's family-owned Armenian roast chicken chain.

At Zankou, the garlic paste comes smeared inside a pita stuffed with bright magenta pickled turnips, chopped tomatoes, and—the main event—hunks of deliciously moist spit-fire-roasted marinated chicken in my favorite, the superlative tarna wrap. I usually ask for extra garlic paste on the side, scooping it up with one of those tiny highlighter-yellow pickled Cascabella peppers and spreading it across the top layer of dark meat and fire-kissed caramelized skin that spills out of the pita like regurgitation from a mama bird's loving mouth.

When I've asked Zankou brass for the recipe for the garlic paste, they demure, saying it's a secret Iskenderian family recipe from the old country. And they've responded with similar reticence to queries about the infamous "Zankou murders," a triple homicide, and the irrevocable schism in the family-owned business, now forever tarnished by events of such tragic proportion.

We'll get to that story in a bit. But the story of Zankou is, first and foremost, the story of legitimately delicious roast chicken.

How good is it? Thought by many to be the best in LA, Zankou's chicken has been praised by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jonathan Gold in his book Counter Intelligence, where—blaspheming the garlic paste—he writes, "such chicken really needs no embellishment." Zankou has been name-checked in the outrageous Beck love-triangle ballad "Debra" as "a real good meal." And Zankou's mythology so permeates the food culture of LA, it's been fictionalized on Larry David's show Curb Your Enthusiasm, where the best roast chicken joint in Los Angeles plays a central role in an episode called "Palestinian Chicken."

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"Palestinian Chicken" is Curb at its best: hilarious and hyperbolic, holding up politics and systems of belief and mocking them effortlessly, all through the filter of Zankou's deliciously schmaltzy chicken skin and Larry's characteristic slapstick outrage.

Curb makes no mention of the iconic garlic paste. And Zankou appears as the fictional Palestinian-run Al Abbas, which opens adjacent to Goldblatt's Deli to the ire of Larry's Zionist-leaning friends (who still allow that the chicken is spectacular). Despite having no pro-Palestine posters hanging in its real-life locations, Zankou is easily recognizable as inspiration for Al Abbas from the signature yellow T-shirts worn by its staff—and of course its chicken, so delicious it could be used to hasten the Middle East peace process.

But beyond the garlic paste curtain at the real-life Zankou lies a tale far from peaceful. It's a story that reads like a mini-epic, taking us from Armenia to Lebanon to Los Angeles, where it turns dark as any Hollywood noir. It's not exactly dinner table conversation, and for good reason: The mythology of the chicken tends to overpower the mythology of the murders in the popular mind. But since Beck and Jonathan Gold and Larry David have already given you every reason to love the chicken, here is the rest of the story.

(The following owes a great debt to Mark Arax's in-depth LA Magazine article, "The Zankou Chicken Murders"—well worth a read for those who like an extra dose of triple-homicide-infused garlic paste with their spit-fired chicken.)

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Zankou is the name of a river in Armenia, but the garlic paste and the chicken restaurants originate in 60s-era Beirut, Lebanon, where the many Armeninans settled after fleeing the genocide. When Vartkes and Markrid Iskenderian came to America with their children, the couple at first attempted a dry cleaning business, thinking they'd leave Zankou behind, but their son, Mardiros, persisted with the idea of bringing Zankou to LA. Eventually, Mardiros's idea won out.

And so in 1983, in a mini-mall in Eastern Hollywood, the Iskenderians started serving their inimitable chicken along with baba ghanoush, schwarma, and of course the famous garlic paste developed by Mardiros's mother, Margrit. The food caught on with LA's growing Middle Eastern population, as well as the rest of us, and soon Mardiros was ready to expand. But his mother and sisters disagreed, so the business split: The family gave Mardiros the permission to expand with new locations around LA, and kept the original location for themselves.

Mardiros started Zankous all over town. There are now nine locations. And while the business continued to grow, family tensions did, too. After her husband died, the aging Margrit moved in with her daughter Dzovig—not her son, as would be traditional in an Armenian family—due to the schism.

On January 14, 2003, Mardiros Iskenderian got up, put on a white suit, and drove to his sister Dzovig's house. Dzovig seated her brother at the table in the dining room, where she poured him a glass of lemonade. The two chatted while waiting for their 76-year-old mother to come home from a shift at Zankou. When Margrit returned, she joined her children at the table. After a few minutes of idle chatter, Mardiros pulled a gun from his waistband, aimed it, and shot his sister in the head, killing her instantly. He chased his mother from the room, shooting her eight times through the heart. Then he walked into the living room, sat on the couch, and shot himself in the head.

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Theories about Mardiros's mental state (he was stricken with cancer at the time of the murders) abound, but the real truth about his motivations is as inaccessible as Zankou's secret garlic paste recipe. Who can guess the mind of a man capable of such acts?

These days, there are still two separately operated Zankou businesses. Not everybody knows that, and since they both serve the famous garlic paste and perfectly roasted chickens, there isn't a great deal to point up the difference. I like to go to the original Zankou, the one of my childhood, which is still there.

It's the most LA-looking place to eat: a storefront in a mini-mall, next to a liquor store and a Laundromat in crappiest Eastern Hollywood. You get there by walking past the panhandlers and Priuses of a cramped Sunset Boulevard parking lot. Inside, staffers in yellow shirts reading "ZANKOU" toil over towers of marinated chicken meat rotating on four foot-tall spits beyond a modest fast-food countertop, on open display to the patrons seated at cramped cafeteria-style booths. It's a variegated set from all walks of LA life, here for the best roast chicken in town.

Sitting here with a tray of tarna wrap, extra spicy peppers, and of course my beloved garlic paste, the strange story of Zankou—the murders, the Curb episode, "Debra"—hangs above me in the slightly smoky, roast-chicken air. I want to think of Zankou as I once did, as a delicious go-to top-ten affordable lunch option. But I find myself thinking about the murders as I stare down at my wrap, now getting cold.

I wonder if Larry David thinks about the murders when he's eating at Zankou. He must. How could you not? And I wonder if Larry David likes to order extra garlic paste. Some people think the flavor overpowers the chicken. Maybe Larry David is in that camp. Maybe that's why he didn't reference garlic paste in "Palestinian Chicken." He left it out intentionally—the same way, for more obvious reasons, he left out the story of the murders.

But you can't order a tarna wrap without garlic paste at Zankou. It comes all mixed in with the other ingredients. Which seems to be a metaphor for something.