What is street food? Street food is good food that's not fancy. It's a great meal you can order quickly, yet without feeling like you're supposed to leave fast. It's food the locals usually know about--food that you don't feel strange eating by yourself, but are always glad to reveal to a special friend. Street food costs less than $10 per person. You order it at the counter, or at least pay for it there.
Spitak
by Richard Risemberg
Spitak Bakery in East Hollywood is almost as unprepossessing in appearance as in name: an angled window and a narrow door in a brown brick façade, on a tired stretch of Hollywood Boulevard where aging brick hotels loom over sunbleached asphalt and yellowing parkway strips. The neighborhood, however, is livelier than a first glance might indicate, with a healthy mix of elderly and twenty-, thirty-, and forty-somethings of every color, most of them immigrants, many of them hip and highly literate, as well as a burgeoning coffeehouse scene where all mix together in raucous harmony. The infrastructure is improving, too, as developers "discover" the area in the wake of the Red Line subway station's opening a block or so east. But Spitak, an old-school Armenian bakery recently opened in a freshly-refurbished building, fits in oddly well, straddling all the worlds that intersect in this little corner of Los Angeles a short walk away from Hollywood and Western.
The proprietors--a short, plump, friendly lady of a certain age, and an older and very rough-looking gentleman--barely speak English, and the entire public area of the establishment consists of one room about the size of an apartment kitchen, in which there is but a single table, two deli cases, and a counter. Beyond the back wall of that insignificant space, however, lurks a genuine hands-on bakery, the staffing of which must have depleted a good-sized neighborhood back home of competent grandmas….
Yes, over the terminally-cluttered formica counter pass fresh, hot delicacies with often unpronounceable names--bereshki, beoreg, and more--as well as breads and pastries and, if you need them, phone cards (a staple of small shops in poor immigrant neighborhoods in LA). Though a good half or more of Spitak's trade consists of bread sales to the local Armenian community--and damn fine bread it is, too, quite different from supermarket fare or the standard French of boutique bakeries--there are also napoleons, doughnuts and creampuffs of delightful configurations and flavors I've found nowhere else, and savory pastries that could make you fat in a week and glad of it. (And yes, my girlfriend's put me on another diet; I am in the Spitak neighborhood nearly every day.) A dollar obtains a potato-stuffed bereshki that will power you for nearly a full day (but who can eat just one?); sixty or seventy cents is enough for a sweet; and the bread is practically free.
They also make pizza, and in case that's not enough, they carry cookies and cakes from another local bakery, as well as sodas, fruit and yoghurt drinks, and just plain bottled water. And coffee beans and, for you addicts, cigarettes….
If you're in the neighborhood for business, or shopping, or to visit Griffith Park (which is just around the corner, up the street from the Metro stop), or are making the rounds of the coffeehouses but want something a little more filling than espresso, check in on Spitak. You won't leave hungry. And you will come back.
Unfortunately, Spitak is now gone.
Text and photos by Richard Risemberg
