Why BlackJack Market matters.
BlackJack Market is an Armenian grocery store where North Hollywood's diasporic character meets house-baked lavash, regional cheeses and a broad pantry assembled across Armenia, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.
Set along Sherman Way near Bellaire Avenue and just steps from Sherman Square, the market occupies western North Hollywood between the commercial spine extending toward Laurel Canyon Boulevard, the residential grid approaching Valley Glen and the industrial blocks reaching north toward Hollywood Burbank Airport, with the Verdugo Mountains rising beyond the eastern San Fernando Valley. Produce, refrigerated cases and densely stocked grocery aisles establish the store's conventional market structure before bakery and deli counters shift attention toward its regional specialties. Fresh bread forms the strongest immediate encounter, with lavash, bran lavash, matnakash and puri produced under BlackJack's own name. A substantial deli moves through Armenian cheeses, cured meats, smoked fish, olives and pickled foods, placing ready-to-eat staples beside imported pantry goods. The result is a neighborhood supermarket whose bakery, deli and Armenian inventory turn an everyday grocery run into an unusually concentrated survey of foods connecting the San Fernando Valley with Armenia and its surrounding region.
What defines BlackJack Market.
BlackJack Market is best known for developing a North Hollywood grocery business around Armenian and Eastern European food traditions under owner George Koshkaryan. Koshkaryan has been associated with the Sherman Way operation across its established commercial history, and Armenian business directories trace BlackJack at the location to December 2015. Its regional specialization extends well beyond packaged imports: the contemporary deli carries Goris sheep cheese, Goris Chanakh, Ashotski Lori, Ashotski Chanakh and Amasia Chanakh alongside European salami, smoked pork loin and other cured meats. BlackJack has built a parallel bakery line under its own name, producing fresh lavash and bran lavash alongside gata, nazook, matnakash, puri, cakes, rolls and pastries. Prepared foods deepen that connection through beef grape-leaf dolma, cabbage dolma, vegetarian sarma, Armenian pasouts dolma and kholodets, moving the market beyond ingredient retail into dishes rooted in Armenian and neighboring culinary traditions. Armenian pantry products such as Royal Armenia adjika and eggplant spreads occupy the shelves beside preserved grape leaves, Georgian-style lemonades and foods from a much wider European import network. Los Angeles's Armenian food economy also reaches the freezer cases through local producers such as Gev's Kitchen, whose dumplings and prepared foods are distributed through BlackJack and other Armenian markets across the region.
Freshly baked lavash gives the bakery its clearest connection to Armenian daily eating, using a thin, flexible bread format suited to wrapping meats, cheeses, herbs and vegetables. Matnakash moves in the opposite direction through a thicker, softer Armenian loaf, and puri adds the elongated bread associated with neighboring Georgian baking traditions. Gata brings richness through a pastry traditionally built around butter and sweet filling, with BlackJack dividing the format into regular, walnut and nazook variations. Goris sheep cheese, Lori and several Chanakh cheeses shift the deli toward the salty, brined dairy traditions of Armenia, creating pairings with the breads that require little further preparation. Pasouts dolma removes meat from the stuffed-leaf tradition, and beef grape-leaf and cabbage versions restore it through two different wrappers, allowing the prepared-food counter to carry several expressions of the same regional technique. Adjika, eggplant spreads, smoked fish, pickles and preserved vegetables complete the repertoire through acidity, smoke, chile and concentrated vegetable flavors, linking bakery, deli and pantry into a coherent Armenian and Caucasian table.
How BlackJack Market fits.
BlackJack Market works as the anchor for an outing connecting a grand public artwork created with hundreds of young Angelenos with North Hollywood's historic library and a memorial built around the San Fernando Valley's extraordinary role in early American aviation.
Begin at Great Wall of Los Angeles, where Judith F. Baca transformed the concrete Tujunga Wash into a 2,754-foot history mural through a project begun after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approached her in 1974. Painting unfolded during summers between 1976 and 1983, with hundreds of young people working alongside artists and historians to develop scenes spanning California history through the 1950s. The work gave sustained visual space to Indigenous communities, immigration, labor, racial discrimination and episodes such as Japanese American incarceration, building a historical sequence across the flood-control channel itself. Its cultural significance brought placement on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017. Continue to North Hollywood Amelia Earhart Regional Library, whose ancestry began with two bookcases inside the Lankershim post office before the growing collection moved through a feed store, a Margate Street building and a Bakman Street branch. Lankershim joined Los Angeles in 1923, took the North Hollywood name in 1927 and received its permanent library building in 1929. The branch became the San Fernando Valley regional library in 1950, nearly tripled in size through a 1950s addition and took Amelia Earhart's name in 1981 in recognition of the aviator who had lived nearby in Toluca Lake. Its historic building entered the National Register in 1987, and a restoration completed after the 1994 Northridge earthquake preceded another expansion in 2002. Conclude at Portal of the Folded Wings, the soaring rotunda designed by Kenneth MacDonald Jr. with sculptural work by Federico Augustino Giorgi and completed in 1924 as the entrance to Valhalla Memorial Park. Its proximity to Union Airport and Lockheed inspired James Gillette to spend two decades pursuing its conversion into an aviation shrine, culminating in a December 17, 1953 dedication on the fiftieth anniversary of powered flight. Fifteen aviation pioneers became associated with the memorial, including Matilde Moisant, the second licensed female pilot in the United States, and Charles Taylor, the machinist who built the Wright brothers' engine. The progression moves from a flood channel converted into an immense public history through a library preserving North Hollywood's evolution from Lankershim and culminates beneath a 1924 rotunda transformed into a permanent memorial to the pioneers of flight.
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