What’s New in Yerevan: Restaurants, Bars and Cafés That Opened This Summer

Shenza has already become one of the city’s favourite new spots. The space is large and dressed-up, with a huge terrace.

The menu is Asia in all its breadth: a raw bar and classic rolls, ramen and tom yum, wok dishes and yakitori, plus duck. There are salmon and beef tartares, beef and salmon tataki, tuna Milanese, popcorn shrimp with wasabi, gyoza with beef or seafood, and an entire page of signature rolls. From the hot dishes: salmon with unagi beurre blanc, Rossini filet, Peking duck, chicken with honey sauce, and woks for every taste, from langoustines to Thai pork. There’s also kung pao, with both chicken and beef versions, each very much a dish in its own right.

In the courtyard, there’s a wishing tree covered in notes from guests: someone is wishing for a trip, someone else for a second serving of Peking duck.

Zula is all about modern Armenia. A former industrial building has been given a graphite façade, a brick second floor, arched windows, emerald velvet and marble. Outside, there’s wicker furniture and a separate round bar under a canopy.

Everything looks familiar right up until you start reading the menu. Classic Armenian ingredients and flavours are reworked into more unexpected combinations and presentations. Breakfast brings eggs Benedict with basturma and prosciutto, scrambled eggs with truffle, and salmon with caviar on a yeast bun. For lunch: a trio of sauces with lavash, pkhali rolls with matsun, aveluk rolls, a layered pie with shrimp and artichoke, eggplant chips with beef tartare and pomegranate. From the hot dishes, there’s beef loin served over farro with mushrooms.

At Tati, a grandmother sometimes greets guests at the door — and that alone is enough to make you feel as though you’ve walked into your own grandmother’s house, where everything is cosy and made just for you. Armenian motifs run throughout the restaurant, while framed photographs on the ceiling look like part of a family archive. The menu is built around family recipes too, so the feeling isn’t limited to the interior.

Dolma comes in five versions: grape leaves, cabbage, Etchmiadzin-style, vegetarian and turkey. There’s also a set for a group of five or six. Then come khinkali, beef and pork ribs made from family recipes with pea or potato purée, Gyumri-style shila, Syunik-style harissa, veal and lamb khashlama. They’re not trying to reinvent Armenian cuisine here — just taking good family recipes out of the home kitchen and giving them a place at a restaurant table.

Kimmi is a project by Beckman Group, the same team behind Sirelis and CJ. Unlike the group’s other projects, this one doesn’t commit to a single direction: sushi sits quite comfortably next to carbonara, pizza and tacos.

The rolls include «Salmon Vulcan» with crab tartare and «Rock n Roll» with torched salmon. There’s carbonara, «Pink Pear & Roquefort» pizza, burgers, tacos, pad thai, and tom yum. From 10am to 4pm, there’s a separate breakfast menu with an English breakfast and avocado toast.

This is a restaurant for the kind of group that spends twenty minutes arguing over what to order, then orders everything.

Dymzavod is a premium Moscow lounge making its Yerevan debut. The interior literally plays with fire: live flames run through black consoles, while mirrors catch and multiply the glow.

The hookahs are a show in themselves. «Requiem» arrives as a skull in a crown of thorns surrounded by roses; «Final Round» is built into a gaming console with a fighting-game screen; «Sweets» looks like a giant ice-cream cone stuffed with Chupa Chups and gummy candies. The bar stocks Clase Azul Ultra and wines all the way up to Amarone Quintarelli.

And the kitchen is not just an afterthought between hookahs: there are tartares, poke, pasta and truffle risotto, tuna, scallops, filet mignon, ribeye and osso buco with orzo. Coming here for twenty minutes would be pointless.

Hunt is a place where the concept runs from the entrance all the way to the plate. The restaurant is built around Stone Age hunting practices — and literally greets guests with a stone arch that looks like the entrance to a cave. The walls imitate rock, rusty-orange panels are carved with a mammoth, ibexes and an eye, while the stonework inside recreates Garni’s «Symphony of Stones.»

The menu continues the theme with a strong focus on meat — there’s a genuinely impressive selection, though it’s all cooked considerably softer than stone. Salmon comes as tartare with guacamole and pine nuts or as tataki with a citrus sauce. Chicken liver pâté is shaped like a honeycomb. «Back to the Roots» is a salad with root vegetables. Everything comes together.

Dessert, «The Last Mammoth, ” mimics the shape of a tusk lying on chocolate soil — probably the safest way to encounter a mammoth in Yerevan.

END Skylounge is a new rooftop bar at Opera Suite Hotel. Instead of a ceiling, there’s open sky and steel trusses lit with red-orange neon. The main feature of the view is Yerevan’s TV tower: in the evening it lights up in different colours and makes an excellent backdrop.

The hookah menu ranges from basic tobacco blends to VIP bowls. The cocktails come with a wink: «End With Love, ” „End With Kiss, ” and so on — you get the idea. The drinks list includes Armenian Takar and Tariri, Dom Pérignon and Belvedere Ten.

You can easily stay for the entire evening over food: tartares, rolls, ribeye and pizza. So this isn’t a «have a cocktail and go find dinner» kind of place. You can start with tartare, move on to rolls, order a ribeye, then somehow decide you also need pizza — and at some point realise it’s already too late to leave the rooftop.

Against the backdrop of all the gastro-experiments and elaborate concepts, sometimes you just want something simple, juicy and easy to understand — and that’s exactly the kind of burger Farshburger delivers. It’s a project by the Novikov Group, serving burgers you simply want to eat, with a good mix of classics and more inventive options.

The «Farsh» line includes a hamburger and cheeseburger. The more imaginative options include «The Guy from Bryansk» with mushroom ragout and bacon, a CamamBurger with baked Camembert and cherry-truffle sauce, and a wagyu burger with grilled asparagus. For snacks: mozzarella sticks, truffle fries and BBQ wings.

Fast, greasy, straightforward. Sometimes that’s more than enough.

Yesy opened outside the centre, slightly off the usual restaurant circuit — the place was founded by a Greek who moved to Armenia. The pita is baked fresh every day, the meat arrives fresh every morning, and the spices are brought directly from Greece. The result tastes what you might call authentic, rather than approximate.

The menu sticks to the classics: beef and chicken gyros, burgers, barbecue, fries and snacks. There’s also a coffee counter operating under the same name, serving espresso, freddo, Spanish latte and alternative milk options.

Mr. Bruno opened in Avan, where there are noticeably fewer concept-driven places than in the centre, so its role is fairly straightforward: to become somewhere people in the neighbourhood go for more than just coffee.

The menu doesn’t force you to choose one cuisine either. Burgers and beef ribs sit alongside carbonara, puttanesca and «Il Mare» pizza with gravlax and shrimp. Starters include vitello tonnato, caprese, meat and cheese platters, and mezze with house-made pesto. There’s also an extensive coffee menu, so you can start your day here too. Finishing it with something considerably heavier is also an option.

Bardo is a project by Melonpan Group, the same team that opened the viral Blanca next door this spring.

Essentially, it’s two venues under one roof. Upstairs is a café and bakery with a display case straight out of a Parisian boulangerie: berry melonpan, classic croissants, and gelato in unexpected flavours like sujuk. Drinks include flat white, V60 filter coffee, matcha with a banana-blackberry tonic, and dessert-style coffees with persimmon and pomegranate syrup.

Downstairs is a wine room serving wines by the glass, cheese and meat platters, and focaccia with salmon. There are also wine sets for trying several wines at once: Armenian Tushpa and Meyron Summerwine, or European Cava Pata Negra Brut, Capo Tinto Syrah and Capo Rosado.

Kyn, at 24 Saryan, is a new concept for Yerevan where a denim boutique and café exist as one space. They carry brands that are rarely, if ever, found in Armenia, while right next to the clothing racks is a bar serving specialty coffee and ceremonial matcha. You come in to pick out clothes and leave with a drink in your hand too.

The main gimmick is the split cup: half coffee, half matcha in a single cup, so you don’t have to choose between your two favourite drinks.

The classic coffee menu is all here — espresso, Americano, cappuccino, flat white, raf and everything else we love. Matcha has its own lineup: latte, strawberry, banana and coconut-water versions, plus lemonades and iced teas in every flavour imaginable.

Finch is one of the few large cafés on Komitas, with a huge terrace and a setup designed for long hangs rather than just grabbing coffee to go. The desserts are also available to take away — especially the layered medovik, the kind of thing where «on the way» means eating it before you’ve even finished the journey.

The coffee menu covers all the essentials: espresso, flat white, Spanish latte, affogato, freddo and iced espresso tonic. Matcha comes in four versions, alongside elderflower and passionfruit lemonades and smoothies.