GastroVino's interview with Mikayel Karsyan opens with a detail that says a lot about how IMAGEMAN works: KTOOR opened its doors on September 1, 2020, in the middle of pandemic restrictions, because the studio chose to keep refining the concept rather than open early on a site that had previously housed a Soviet-era eatery on Saryan Street. The name — Armenian for 'the roof' — came out of a shortlist from the project's branding partner, and it ended up shaping everything that followed, down to the restaurant's own line about dining under one roof.
The concept itself is drawn from Kond, one of Yerevan's oldest neighbourhoods — a dense, Persian-founded quarter where buildings stack unevenly over each other and one resident's balcony doubles as another's rooftop. Rather than clean that history up, IMAGEMAN built it into the room: reclaimed textures, aged plaster, worn brick and timber balconies, some pieces sourced directly from the quarter itself. Karsyan has described the goal plainly — take a part of the city most people overlooked and turn it into somewhere guests fall in love with.
“The interior is the set, the open kitchen is the performance, and the staff are the cast — every visit should reveal something new.”
That same instinct shaped the menu framing. Rather than present the food as strictly Armenian, the restaurant calls it 'Yerevan cuisine' — a nod to the many communities that have shaped the capital's food culture over generations, and a label that gives the kitchen more room to move. It's paired with a fully open kitchen, a Persian-style oven for bread baked to order, and a grill in full view of the dining room — deliberately loud, deliberately visible.
For Karsyan, that openness is the whole point. He describes the restaurant as a small theatre: the interior is the set, the open kitchen is the main performance, the staff are the cast, and a guest should notice something new each time they come back.
