From pickles to pilaf, these are Armenia’s best bites.

To the uninitiated, eating in Armenia can be discombobulating. One meal you could be spooning tabbouleh onto flatbread and licking tahini off your fingers, while the next you might be excavating a mound of Russian-style potato salad or gobbling down dumplings that wouldn’t look out of place in a dim sum parlor. That’s the joy of Armenian food: It cherry-picks the most enticing flavors from Persia, Russia, Georgia, and the Levant to shock even the most jaded of palates.

But Armenian cuisine isn’t just an East-West hodgepodge—it’s very much its own thing. Dishes like khash, a garlicky trotter stew, and lavash, the nation’s omnipresent flatbread, have graced the Armenian table for centuries if not millennia. And the discovery of the world’s oldest known winery in the Areni Cave complex makes Armenia a contender for wine’s place of origin (though Georgia currently holds the title).

Today the question of what Armenian food is—and what it isn’t—is highly subjective (and even contentious), since the Armenian diaspora stretches from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles to Moscow and beyond; in fact, nearly three-quarters of the world’s Armenians live outside the mother country. The main impetus for this dispersal was the Armenian Genocide of 1915, which forced millions of Armenians to flee their ancestral home of eastern Turkey. These Levantine refugees cooked quite differently from their Armenian brethren farther east, which is why Armenian cooking in diaspora communities often skews more Middle Eastern than most of the food you’ll encounter in Armenia today.

The differences between eastern and western Armenian culinary traditions would grow more pronounced in the decades following World War I, when Armenia came under Soviet control. Collectivized farming homogenized and Russia-fied Armenian cuisine, replacing lamb with pork and beef and wine with vodka and cognac. Food was scarce to begin with, and those who could afford it were introduced to Eastern European dishes like chicken Kiev, borscht, and okroshka that supplanted countless traditional Armenian recipes.

Thankfully a new generation of Armenians is reclaiming its culinary past. In Yerevan, restaurants like Dolmama, Tapastan, and The Club spotlight dishes from both eastern and western culinary canons with some international touches (teriyaki sauce! prosciutto!) sprinkled in. And then there are organizations like the 1,000 Leaf Project, whose mission is to research and promote edible wild plants and mushrooms that were once a cornerstone of the Armenian diet.

Waves of repatriation of diaspora Armenians from Lebanon, Iran, and (most recently) Syria and beyond are also shaking up the country’s food scene with previously unfamiliar Levantine-influenced dishes. For instance, Yerevanians can now choose whether they want their lahmajoon, a meat-topped flatbread, served old-school (with lemon and parsley) or Syrian-style (with pomegranate molasses and Aleppo pepper).

In the midst of all the culinary cross-pollination, compiling a be-all-end-all list of Armenia’s best bites might sound like a fool’s errand at best and a death wish at worst (we can hear the Armenian grandmothers turning in their graves)—so consider these dishes a delicious jumping-off point, an Armenian-food CliffsNotes to keep in your back pocket whether you’re in the Caucasus or at your local Armenian restaurant.