Why Urartu Coffee matters.
Urartu Coffee is a familial Armenian café where Downtown Glendale's Armenian character meets traditional soorj, local art and a father-and-son business conceived as a gathering place for the surrounding community.
Set along Artsakh Avenue near Broadway and just steps from the commercial blocks surrounding Brand Boulevard, the café occupies Glendale's compact downtown grid between civic buildings, retail corridors and the residential neighborhoods rising toward the Verdugo Mountains. A small interior combines café tables with books, artwork and furnishings that give the room the intimacy of a domestic gathering space. Armenian coffee shares the counter with espresso drinks, cold brew, tea, pastries, breakfast preparations and sandwiches. Artwork and occasional musical performances extend the café beyond food and drink into the creative life of the surrounding Armenian community. The result is a Glendale coffeehouse whose physical modesty supports an unusually substantial cultural role within the city's Armenian commercial center.
What defines Urartu Coffee.
Urartu Coffee is best known for building a family-operated Armenian coffeehouse around traditional soorj and a community role that has developed across more than two decades. Urik and Lora Ghazalian brought their son Youra into the café when he was 12, and Youra learned the operation by watching his parents, preparing items from the menu and growing up around its regular customers. The family traces the contemporary business to 2004, although an earlier Urartu Coffee operation under co-owner Arthur Melkonyan was already hosting acoustic jazz and displaying imagery of ancient Armenian civilization in Glendale by February 2003. Urik and Youra subsequently developed the café as their shared father-and-son project, with musicians, artists, lawyers, teachers and other regulars using the room across different stages of their careers. Armenian artists have displayed work on its walls, musicians have performed inside the café and Ani Kalafian has conducted Armenian coffee readings from the grounds remaining after a cup of soorj. The café also participated in Glendale's Armat Armenian History Celebration alongside the Armenian American Museum, Armenian Film Society, USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies and other cultural organizations. Its surroundings changed symbolically in 2018 when the city renamed this section of Maryland Avenue as Artsakh Avenue, placing a longstanding Armenian-owned café directly on a street honoring the region known to Armenians as Artsakh.
Soorj starts with finely ground coffee simmered in a pot and reaches the cup unfiltered, leaving the grounds necessary for the fortune-reading tradition practiced inside Urartu. The espresso program takes another route through drinks such as the Urartu Twist, cappuccino, macchiato, affogato, mocha and chai combinations, broadening the café beyond its Armenian centerpiece. Slow-steeped cold brew develops a smoother chilled preparation, and café au lait pairs drip coffee with steamed milk. Breakfast moves through croissant omelets filled with bacon, turkey or ham and cheese, giving the pastry case a more substantial morning role. Milkiway Picante layers cream cheese, bacon and jalapeño onto a bagel, and avocado toast combines avocado with cilantro, lime and radish. The Brotein Me Up smoothie brings peanut butter, banana, honey, almond milk and chocolate whey protein together, demonstrating how a café grounded in one highly specific Armenian preparation has accumulated a much broader contemporary repertoire around it.
How Urartu Coffee fits.
Urartu Coffee works as the anchor for an outing connecting Glendale's surviving rancho landscape with a preserved nineteenth-century adobe and the movie palace that became the architectural centerpiece of downtown revival.
Begin at Catalina Verdugo Adobe, a surviving residence from Rancho San Rafael, the 36,403-acre Spanish land grant associated with José María Verdugo. Catalina Verdugo and her brother Julio inherited portions of the rancho, and the adobe became Catalina's home during the nineteenth century. Its grounds preserve remnants of the Oak of Peace, beneath which Californio representatives discussed surrender terms in January 1847 before the Treaty of Cahuenga brought armed conflict in California during the Mexican-American War to an end. Los Angeles later acquired the property, preserving one of Glendale's oldest surviving links to the rancho that preceded the modern city. Continue to Casa Adobe de San Rafael, built by former Los Angeles County sheriff Tomás Sánchez and Maria Sepulveda on 100 acres descended from the Verdugo landholding. Adobe blocks formed the walls, and the house developed around a hacienda plan with a covered Monterey-style corridor. Demolition threatened the deteriorating property in 1930 after the California Medicinal Wine Company acquired it, prompting neighbors to organize around its preservation. Glendale purchased the adobe that year and completed its refurbishment by 1932, and the property later became California Historical Landmark No. 235. Conclude at Alex Theatre, where architects Arthur G. Lindley and Charles R. Selkirk created the Alexander Theatre during Glendale's rapid 1920s expansion. The movie palace opened in September 1925 and spent decades screening films before ending regular first-run operation in 1991 with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Glendale's redevelopment agency purchased the building in 1992 and undertook a $6.5 million rehabilitation that reopened it as a performing-arts center on New Year's Eve 1993. National Register recognition followed in 1996, and 70mm projection returned the building to first-run exhibition in 2026 when Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey became its first new-release feature in 35 years. The progression moves from the rancho landscape preceding Glendale through a nineteenth-century adobe rescued by local preservation and culminates inside a 1925 movie palace whose restoration and return to first-run cinema span a century of downtown cultural life.
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