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Order a grenadine in France, and you’ll get a glass of bright red syrup made from pomegranate to sip with water for a refreshing quaff. In Armenia, the grenade – pomegranate – is a national icon, depicted in art, consumed at meals and made into a local liqueur. Stemming from the country’s ancient mythology, the grenade symbolizes fertility and abundance, making it a fitting name for Couleur Grenade, a female-owned Armenian restaurant in Marseille.

From stuffed eggplant to tchi kefté (beef tartare), Couleur Grenade offers a lexicon in Armenian cuisine. Growing up in Lyon, the restaurant’s owner, Gayane Doniguian was French at school – her friends called her Delphine – and Armenian at home. Cooking with her grandmother at an early age sealed her love for Armenian cuisine. As an adult, the loss of her beloved matriarch led her to Armenia, where she immersed herself in the language, culture and food to be “close to my pillar,” as she says. Though the space is simple, a meal at Couleur Grenade has the warmth of dining in someone’s home. Gayane cooks everything in the open kitchen, humming along to music as she stirs, bakes and dresses plates.

Gayane’s restaurant career began in the front of the house. A job tending bar besides a kitchen tempted her to try her hand at cooking, and making dishes from her homeland brought her closer to her grandmother and to the local Armenian community. Gayane first launched Couleur Grenade in 2011 in Lyon. It closed in 2013 when she became pregnant and followed her partner to Marseille, his hometown and home of the third largest Armenian community in Europe. After their relationship faltered, she needed work, yet wanted to keep her son close to his dad. So, she transformed Couleur Grenade into a Marseille food truck.

Painted in the blue, orange and red of the Armenian flag, her Peugeot dished out dolma and other dishes in the Joliette neighborhood. Though successful, she says it was “too physical” to do on her own. Eager to keep her food truck clientele and add to it good foot traffic, she found a location between the Vieux-Port and Le Panier. Many of Marseille’s Armenian eateries are in the eastern neighborhoods (like Beaumont and Saint-Antoine), where refugees settled after the 1915 genocide. But being central allows Gayane to share her homeland’s food with Marseillais and tourists alike, regardless of their heritage.

At the crossroads of Asia and Europe, Armenian cuisine has been influenced by Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. You can taste how Gayane leans more towards the latter two with her mezzes, a vegetarian medley of tabbouleh, hummus and djadjar – a yogurt dill dip that is the Armenian version of Greek tzatziki. The menu at Couleur Grenade is peppered with recipes from Gayane’s grandmother, with dishes she learned during her Yerevan days. We’re fans of the bomba ichli keufté, bulgur-coated meatballs simmered in tomato sauce, and sini keufté, the same ingredients in a cake form. “I can taste my grandmother’s cooking,” Gayane gushes while talking about her harissa, a meat and spelt porridge that has a pool of melted butter in the middle. “We use a lot of butter in Armenian food,” she adds. Like in her tasty sou-berag, known as Armenian lasagna, in which phyllo dough is layered with salted feta and parsley.

From stuffed eggplant to tchi kefté, Couleur Grenade offers a lexicon in Armenian cuisine.

Homemade desserts steer more towards the Middle East, with the sticky baklava and kadayif (shredded phyllo pastry) both made with simple syrup instead of honey. An array of Armenian beverages are on hand to complete any meal, including kompot, a traditional drink made with cooked fruit, sugar and water. We like to cut the sweetness with the Armenian-brand Jermuk sparkling water. There is Kilikia beer and Noravank wine, as well as deep crimson pomegranate wine, that can be sipped as an aperitif or with dessert.

Open since April 2019, Couleur Grenade has had its share of bumps in the road. The pandemic caused many months of closures and forbade in-house dining. As part of the city’s urban renewal project, the road in front of her restaurant was cluttered with fences and construction workers for a year and a half. Now, the newly widened sidewalk lures in pedestrians and affords Gayane a larger front patio with views of two of Marseille’s oldest buildings, the Hotel Cabre and the Église des Accoules.

Gayane’s blend of birthplace and ancestry is a common one for many of the city’s Armenians. She tells us her clientele is a third Armenian – the rest is French or foreigners. Her block is a culinary United Nations, home to a Greek, a Lebanese, and a Berber couscous restaurant, and the Vietnamese Nguyen-Hoang around the corner. Couleur Grenade is another ingredient that is perfectly at home in the melting pot of multicultural Marseille.

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Published on August 11, 2021

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