Menu AM is an Armenian community restaurant podcast and media platform powered by Orders.co. Hosted by Meri Makaryan and Arman Margaryan, Menu AM sits down with restaurant owners, chefs, and food entrepreneurs to talk about what building a food business really takes. Over the past year, Menu AM content received approximately 30 million views.
The show centers on local Armenian restaurant owners, and it stays open to anyone with a restaurant, food business, or entrepreneurial story worth telling. Interviews are recorded in person at the Menu AM studio in Burbank, California, in the Los Angeles area.
Every Restaurant Has a Story Customers Never See
Menu AM is built on one idea: every restaurant has a story its customers never see.
Customers experience the finished product. They see the food, the dining room, the menu, the Instagram posts, and the full tables on a busy night. That is the part of the business designed to be seen.
What they don’t see is everything that made it possible. The years of work before opening day. The risk of signing a lease. The financial pressure, the early mistakes, and the long days. The family members who pitched in. The cultural influences behind the menu. The staffing problems and operational headaches. The moments when the owner thought about giving up, and the changes that finally made the business work.
Then there are the lessons. Many restaurant owners know exactly what they would tell someone opening a restaurant today. Those lessons rarely get recorded anywhere.
Menu AM is where those conversations happen. That is what separates it from most restaurant content. Menu AM isn’t content about restaurants. It is content from the people actually building them, in their own words.
An Armenian Community Podcast Built Around Real Restaurant Experiences
Menu AM gives Armenian restaurant owners and food entrepreneurs a place to share stories that often exist only inside families, kitchens, and local communities.
Many Armenian food businesses carry generations of knowledge. It lives in recipes passed down through families, in businesses started after immigration, and in traditions adapted for American customers. It lives in parents, children, and siblings working side by side, in founders building something for the next generation, and in restaurateurs introducing Armenian food and hospitality to new audiences.
No two of those stories are the same, and Menu AM doesn’t try to fit them into one narrative. As an Armenian-language show, it gives owners room to tell their stories in Armenian and in their own words.
Menu AM’s community role also reaches beyond the studio. On November 1, 2026, Menu AM and GiniFest organized the inaugural Armenian Food Festival in Glendale, in partnership with ArmenianArts and Orders.co.
Menu AM has its roots in the Armenian restaurant community, but a great restaurant story doesn’t have to fit one background or one business model. The show remains open to anyone with a meaningful restaurant, food business, or entrepreneurial story.
What Restaurant Owners Talk About on Menu AM
Menu AM conversations follow the full arc of building a restaurant: how it started, what went wrong, what changed, and what the owner learned.
Guests talk about their beginnings, including why they chose a cuisine, a concept, or a neighborhood. They talk about the hardships and challenges that tested them, from staffing to cash flow to daily operations. They talk about mistakes, milestones, growth, and the role culture plays in their food and hospitality. And they talk about what restaurant ownership actually looks like behind the scenes.
Success on Menu AM doesn’t mean pretending the difficult parts never happened. Many restaurants that are doing well today got there by working through something hard. Those parts of the story are often the most useful to someone else.
Learning From Owners Instead of Learning the Expensive Way
Restaurant stories can keep future owners from learning every lesson the expensive way. Someone thinking about opening a restaurant can learn a lot from hearing why another founder:
- chose the wrong location
- underestimated construction costs
- struggled to hire and keep staff
- changed the menu
- learned how to market the business
- added delivery
- expanded too quickly
- waited before opening a second location
- underestimated how complex daily operations would be
Menu AM helps aspiring and current owners understand the realities of the industry through the people who have lived them.
More Than Interviews: What You Can Watch on Menu AM
Menu AM produces four kinds of content: restaurant shows and podcasts, cooking shows, restaurant tips, and brand stories.
Restaurant Shows and Podcasts
Menu AM’s restaurant shows and podcasts are long-form interviews with restaurant owners, founders, operators, chefs, and food entrepreneurs. The length is the point. A long conversation leaves room for details a short clip can’t hold: the order in which decisions were made, the tradeoffs behind them, and what the owner would do differently now. Viewers come away with the reasoning behind a business, not just the outcome.
Cooking Shows
Menu AM cooking shows feature restaurant owners, chefs, and cooks preparing dishes on camera. Cooking reveals things an interview can’t. You see a cook’s technique, their habits, the steps they refuse to skip, and the way they talk about where a dish came from. The food becomes another way to tell the story of the person, family, culture, or restaurant behind it. These aren’t generic recipe videos. They show how someone thinks when they cook.
Restaurant Tips
Menu AM restaurant tips are practical lessons from people who work in restaurants every day. Topics include opening a restaurant, operations, customer service, marketing, staffing, technology, growth, and lessons learned the hard way. For current owners, the tips are a chance to compare notes with peers. For people considering the industry, they are a realistic preview of the work. Advice carries more weight when it comes from someone who has worked a dinner rush.
Brand Stories
Menu AM brand stories explain how restaurants and food businesses came to exist. They cover family histories, cultural influences, and immigration stories where relevant. They explain why a founder chose a particular cuisine or concept, how the business survived difficult periods, and how it became part of its community. For customers, a brand story turns a familiar storefront into something more personal by showing the people, values, and work behind it.
Why Millions of Views Point to Something Bigger Than a Podcast
Menu AM content received approximately 30 million views over the past year, according to the Menu AM and Orders.co team. The number matters less as a milestone than as a signal: people are interested in what happens behind the food.
Views are not the same as individual viewers, and the figure doesn’t mean 30 million different people watched. What it does show is a real interest in a specific kind of content. People want founder stories and restaurant lessons. They want personalities, recipes, and local businesses. They want culture, and they want practical knowledge they can use.
For restaurant owners, the takeaway is simple. The story behind your business, including the hard parts, is worth telling.
Why Face-to-Face Conversations Still Matter
Menu AM invites guests to its Burbank studio for in-person conversations because understanding people still requires conversation.
This isn’t a case against technology. Orders.co is a restaurant technology company, and technology can make restaurant operations more efficient. But restaurants are built on hospitality, relationships, trust, community, personality, and experience. Those qualities come through most clearly when people sit across from each other.
An in-person interview gives hosts and guests room for a deeper, less scripted conversation. The goal is not a polished founder success story where everything looks easy. The goal is to make room for what went wrong, what surprised the founder, what they would change, what they learned, and what finally worked.
That is also why guests don’t need to be famous or run a large restaurant brand to have something valuable to say.
Meet the Hosts: Meri Makaryan and Arman Margaryan
Menu AM is hosted by Meri Makaryan and Arman Margaryan.
Meri and Arman help restaurant owners and entrepreneurs unpack how their business started, the decisions that changed its direction, and the challenges they didn’t see coming. They draw out the lessons, the personal experiences, and the food and culture behind each business. They also help guests put into words what other operators can learn from their experience. The guest’s story stays at the center.
Why Orders.co Powers Menu AM
Orders.co powers Menu AM because working closely with independent restaurants makes one thing clear: restaurant operators hold a huge amount of knowledge that rarely gets documented.
Orders.co helps independent restaurants simplify operations, regain control, and compete without adding unnecessary complexity. But supporting restaurants isn’t limited to software. Many owners are carrying on cultural traditions, building something for their families, and investing in their neighborhoods. That work deserves to be seen.
Menu AM is one way Orders.co supports it. The show gives restaurant owners visibility, shares their lessons, and documents their experiences. It creates connections within the industry and helps future operators learn from people already doing the work.
Have a Restaurant Story? Menu AM Wants to Hear It
If you have a restaurant or food-business story worth sharing, DM Menu AM on Instagram and tell the team about it.
You don’t need a national restaurant chain, thousands of Instagram followers, a perfect success story, celebrity status, or decades in business. What matters is a story with substance: honest experience that other people in the restaurant community can learn from.
A great Menu AM story could come from, for example:
- someone opening their first restaurant
- a family restaurant passed from one generation to the next
- an immigrant founder
- an owner who recovered from a major business setback
- a chef turning a food idea into a company
- a restaurateur expanding to a second location
- a cafe owner, bakery owner, or caterer
- a food truck operator or ghost kitchen founder
- someone running a small neighborhood restaurant
- anyone with a hard-earned lesson the restaurant community could benefit from
The Menu AM team reviews the stories it receives and selects guests from there, so not every message leads to an appearance. Selected guests are invited for an in-person recording at the Menu AM studio:
3073 N California Street
Burbank, CA 91504
Where to Watch Menu AM
Menu AM publishes full episodes on its YouTube channel and shares content on Instagram, Facebook, and MenuAM.com.
Orders.co also powers Menu EN, a sister show that brings the same kind of restaurant-owner conversations to an English-speaking audience.
