One could assemble a cow piece by piece at Glendale’s Sevan Meat Market. Precision-cut steaks sit in neat rows. Whole feet rest tippy-toed, perpetually frozen in pre-pirouette. Packs of brains live on the shelf below, flat and frozen. This is how I imagine my brain looks after a few hours of scrolling TikTok, and yet I feel bound to it, because everyone is on TikTok these days, even my favorite meat market.
Sevan Meat Market’s social media videos — conceived by owner Hrach Marukyan, his son Serop and manager Norvan Simonian — tell an Armenian American story built on beef, a story of the old and new, of adaptation to a rapidly changing world. And their growing audience of now nearly 60,000 Instagram followers is eagerly tuning in.
In one recent video, three women with flowing hair and model-esque features sit near an old-timey well. It’s sunny outside, and they’re wearing cowboy hats. They wave to someone off camera, batting their eyelashes and giggling to each other. One shrugs and removes her flannel to reveal a delicate white sundress. Is this AI-generated?
Before I have time to ponder further, it’s revealed who they’re waving at, a cowboy with a horse. One of the girls approaches him. She’s holding two tomahawk steaks, sealed in plastic. She points to the steaks, bites her lip, then flashes him a thumbs-up. He’s impressed. She climbs on his horse, and they ride off into the distance. The graphic onscreen reads “Sevan Meat Market.”
I first learned of Sevan Meat Market at chef Diadié Diombana’s pop-up at Melody Wine Bar in Virgil Village two years ago.
Sevan “was his first stop off the plane from Paris,” my dining partner, private chef Gwendolyn Fogel, told me. “I had to take him.”
Later, I’d note it in my phone as a recommendation from other chefs. “Easy place for lamb,” one note said. “Good quality, good price,” said another.
The first time I showed up, I was surprised by the modernity. I expected an old-school Armenian butcher, not a sleek black exterior with a Wagyu decal on the window. The market’s Instagram was equally unexpected. Over the top, sexy and completely absurd 30-second clips starring the most lavish of Sevan’s offerings. At first glance one might dismiss the content as lowbrow, sensational clickbait. But Sevan’s social media strategy holds a mirror to popular culture more than one might think.
Sevan’s Instagram is almost like a look back through the history of viral content itself. The market posted its first video in 2020, depicting a box of Waygu being opened in the now-ancient Instagram Boomerang format. In 2022, an aerial time-lapse of a tomahawk being cut as was the fashion in those days. In early 2024, we’re served a feast of recipe videos, for cheese lula kebab and osso bucco sandwiches. In late 2024, the cowboy videos premiere, tons of them. Similar to the style of a duanju, a vertical movie format popularized in China that’s broken into the American market with short films such as “Fake Married to My Billionaire CEO” and “Doctor Boss Is My Baby Daddy,” they’re racy, tedious, laugh-out-loud and have seen a 992% increase in downloads between 2023 and 2024.
A facet of Sevan’s cowboy videos not to be ignored is the placement of the meat within a hyper-specific context. Gone are the steaks against white backdrops in weekly flyers of the past, those steaks could be anywhere. These steaks exist on a lush farm, they’re rugged, masculine and beloved by beautiful women. These steaks are high quality. They’re luxurious, they’re … American?
Beef, long synonymous with American exceptionalism, has a history of employing marketing tactics that play on ideals of tradition, ubiquity and family. Take the iconic Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner campaign from the 1990s and later ads like Powerful Beefscapes from 2008, which not-so-subtly insist on an America built on beef.
Sevan’s videos position beef as a luxury item, a nod to the market’s standards and a clever strategy considering groceries is the top category Gen Z and millennials are willing to splurge on.
“It’s not just me; my colleagues and I put all our ideas together,” Sevan’s manager and video star Simonian tells me at the shop. When asked about his inspiration, he simply said, “Instagram and YouTube.”
Production takes place at Sevan owner Hrach Marukyan’s cousin’s ranch in Springville, Calif., just north of Bakersfield. He then introduces me to Hamlet Saturyan, the cousin in question. Saturyan makes the three-hour drive from Springville Ranch every week with a truck full of grapevine wood.
“I bring it for them to sell because it’s good for barbecue. It’s traditional and gives the barbecue more flavor,” Saturyan says.
He tells me about Springfield. “All of Sequoia National Park reminds me of Armenia. We don’t have the giant trees, but the mountains, the rivers and the lakes.”
Simonian’s instincts proved fruitful. As his videos racked up views and shares, he started noticing new faces in the shop, an increase in sales and customers traveling from San Diego and Orange County to get their hands on a Sevan steak.
“They even take our meat to different countries. Like … Armenia!” he says with a smile. “When we stop posting videos for like a week, [our customers] are like, ‘OK … we’re waiting for your new videos, where are they?’”
Later, I visit the original Sevan Meat location on East Broadway and find that old-school Armenian butcher I expected to walk into the first time. The peach-colored stone tiles on the walls resemble the marbling on a good steak. Rows of plastic cow figurines stand perched on shelves above the butchers, who chatter away in Armenian to a crowd of customers, older than those at the new shop, pointing at lamb chops and whole chickens.
Both stores carry the same product, they’re owned and operated by the same people, and their separate social media accounts are the same, for the most part. The newer Colorado Street location has about 50,000 more followers, though; a fleet of newer, hipper cars in the parking lot; and a clientele who might just splurge on Waygu tonight and wouldn’t bat an eye at the term “doomscroll.”
The old and the new Sevan are a neat pair, and a not-so-subtle reminder that the small distance between first- and second-generation immigrants can often feel like a chasm. The old Sevan opened in 2005, the new four years later. They’re a three-minute drive away from one another and at the same time a world apart.
“We didn’t advertise at all before this.” Serop Marukyan says. “It was all word of mouth.”
When I ask Simonian about this switch, he smiles and says, “We have to go with the new generation.”
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