Glendale Deli Behind a Viral $38 Sandwich Makes NYT's 50 Best Restaurants

Yerord Mas began as a ghost kitchen, dropped the sandwich that ate 70% of its labor and now feeds about 120 nightly.

The Glendale deli whose $38 basturma sandwich set off an internet price fight just made the New York Times' list of America's 50 best restaurants.

It's Yerord Mas Bakery & Deli. LAist reported the news on Sept. 25 in a column by Gab Chabrán, the LAist food writer who called this in 2024, back when the place was a tiny ghost kitchen.

It has a real room now. It opened in January near the original kitchen and seats 21 people at a time. Owner Arthur Grigoryan told LAist the Times attention has pushed sales up, and on good nights the restaurant feeds about 120 people.

Just don't show up for the sandwich. It's gone.

The early call

Chabrán's 2024 piece started with that sandwich and a lahmajoun, the thin Armenian flatbread. He wrote that he went back to the office afterward and told his editor he'd found the city's next great restaurant, a call his editor had learned to trust even when it sounded a bit much.

The $38 problem

Basturma is an Armenian cousin of pastrami, and the sandwich was built to split between two people: thick-cut seasoned brisket, melted Swiss, house pickles and chaman spread on aish baladi, an Egyptian flatbread in the pita family. The recipe came from Grigoryan's Armenian grandmother, who grew up in Egypt.

In a city where a sandwich over $20 becomes a conversation, $38 became a referendum. Reddit threads and TikTok creators piled on, and plenty of them came in mainly to rule on whether it was worth the money.

"There was one evening where I only had six tables in my dining room, and four out of the six tables had their tripods out, just recording," Grigoryan told LAist.

The bigger problem was in the kitchen. Grigoryan said the sandwich was eating roughly 70% of the restaurant's labor, and he pulled it as a business call rather than to quiet the comment sections. He still hasn't made peace with it. "It was a blessing," he said. "But at the same time, it was also a curse."

What turned it around

The trolls didn't go quiet first. While Grigoryan was fighting back on his own Instagram, reposting the criticism, strong reviews came in from the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, and he told LAist that's when he realized he'd been taking the online noise far too hard on himself.

What's on the menu now

The lineup rotates through a handful of dishes, and the one to know is the hanger steak kebab, which Grigoryan says sells out regularly. Also in the rotation: a kebab done the Aleppo way, sauced with sour cherries. There's a yogurt kofte soup, too, and it changes with the season.

On weekends the kitchen makes chi kyuftah, a steak tartare mixed with bulgur, red onion, pomegranate molasses and Aleppo pepper. The Times and Chabrán agree on this place, and with a tartare built on bulgur and pomegranate molasses, I get it.

Grigoryan and Petrosyan built Yerord Mas without investors, and they still run it as a mom-and-pop spot, cooking dishes with deep roots in their community for Glendale and anyone else in Los Angeles willing to make the drive.

If the tartare is your reason to go, go on a Saturday or Sunday. It's weekends only.

Source: laist.com, retrieved September 26, 2026.