Carousel

Long tables in the big dining hall on Brand fill with birthday parties and families of a dozen or more, and on a busy night the restaurant's birthday song plays more than once. The Tcholakian family opened the first Carousel in Hollywood in 1984, and their son Mike added this larger Glendale room in 1998. Order smoky mutabbal and muhammara with pita, the soujouk that gets set alight at the table, and kebabs, or the Carousel Feast, which covers most of the menu for the whole table. To drink, there's Armenian wine and an Ararat Manhattan.