YEREVAN, Armenia – Mariam Ghazanchyan is preparing a chicken and bulgur pilaf she has made hundreds of times. The dish, served often in many Armenian households, is probably not made elsewhere like Ghazanchyan’s. Her bulgur began as local wheat, which she and her husband, Grigor Dovlatyan, dried and cracked in a long process that took them more than two weeks. Everyone in the community buys bulgur from the family – three generations live in this house — and the deliciously nutty grain is satisfying like well-made bread.

Among the guests at their table is Seta Dakessian, a first-generation Armenian-American restaurateur from Belmont. She owns Seta’s Cafe, where the menu is Armenian and Mediterranean, and is here for the first time to observe many things: to meet typical families and learn how they live and cook, to see how bakers make the bread lavash in a tonir oven (like an Indian tandoor), and to find forgotten dishes and resurrect them on her cafe menu. I am tagging along.

We have an energetic tour guide whom Dakessian met through a friend in Boston. Susan Yacubian Klein, who lives in Yerevan and Princeton, N.J., and was raised in Belmont, has brought us to meet this family. Klein has dined many times with Miriam and Grigor, their son, Avetis, his wife, Anahit, and their children, Mariam and Grigor. While her mother-in-law makes bulgur, Anahit prepares a buttery dough called gata, similar to puff pastry, which she rolls into a log and cuts with a zigzag implement before baking. Dakessian watches intently, writing down metric measurements; she has tasted gata a few days earlier and fallen hard for them.

Klein takes us to other private homes, to restaurants whose owners she knows, to countryside spots like the stunning Lake Sevan, and to meet village women who cook together.

Dakessian, 41, speaks what she calls “western Armenian.’’ Although not everyone understands her, she understands pretty much everything she hears. She learned English watching “Sesame Street.’’ Her parents, who owned a bakery in Worcester, were part of the diaspora and neither had ever been to Armenia. In the early 20th century, to flee the genocide, Dakessian’s paternal grandparents left Marash, Turkey, for Palestine, where her late father, Kevork, was born; her maternal grandparents went from Marash to Lebanon, where her mother, Mary, who works at Seta’s Cafe, was raised. “Neither of my parents has been to Armenia,’’ says Dakessian, who took her mother back to Lebanon several years ago.

As Dakessian would discover, the Armenian diaspora across Europe and the Middle East has kept its connection to its culture, its cuisine, its people, and the homeland. Wherever Armenians are in the world, they stay together, says Raffi Kassarjian, cofounder of Impact Hub Yerevan. Kassarjian lived in California for over 30 years and is one of a growing group of repatriated Armenians. “People created communities to protect each other against the outside,’’ he says.

We stop one day for lunch at Gaidz, a lamejun shop near Republic Square owned by a Syrian-Armenian repat. Gaidzag Jabaghchourian, 27, left Syria with his mother, Salpy, at the start of the war and opened the lamejun spot in 2013; he and his late father had a restaurant in Syria. He urged other Syrian-Armenians he knew at home to leave when he did, he says, and finds it difficult to watch the mass exodus now. His thin lamejuns have many toppings besides the classic ground lamb and tomatoes; one flatbread is spread simply with olive oil and za’atar. We try half a dozen and Dakessian, who has started to make lavash in pizza ovens, and who opened her cafe the same year as this one, has a long chat with Jabaghchourian. “He’s been able to accomplish everything he wanted to,’’ he tells her. “But most important, is that Armenia gave him the opportunity.’’

Several times we join Cambridge resident Carolyn Mugar, founder of the Armenia Tree Project and Klein’s first cousin, on excursions she organizes for other visitors. One day our van stops on the side of a highway where half a dozen mom-and-pop vendors are selling their wares. Dakessian is excited as she goes from stand to stand. “I wanted to buy something from everyone,’’ she says, staggering back into the van with bags of dried apricots, walnuts, grapes, and more.

Klein takes us one morning to Hay Tagh village, where many residents are related and three generations of women bake 120 lavash a day in the fall to last every family all winter. They are at the home of Rima Gasparian, 86, working outside in a courtyard, kneading dough and rolling it into balls. Bins hold walnuts and apples picked from overhanging trees.

In the kitchen, one of the villagers is filling a hollowed-out pumpkin with honey and butter, adding cooked rice, golden raisins, apricots, plums, apples, and cinnamon, topping them with more honey and butter, then the lid, and baking the round for two hours. Later, when the pumpkin is cut, the rice is permeated with the bright flavor of the tender squash, which is served along side it. At home weeks later, Dakessian perfects the dish.

The tonir, in a room beside the house, has a wood fire burning in the deep conical opening. Once it becomes coals, three women sit in front of it, one rolling dough, another stretching pieces into yard-long oblongs, the third draping one over a large padded pillow and smacking it onto the oven wall, where it sits for two minutes until it chars and puffs. It’s pulled from the oven with an iron. As they work, other villagers hear that Americans are visiting and several men stop by. “I just got my fourth marriage proposal,’’ whispers Dakessian.

The breads dry in cupboards all winter and before they’re served, they’re sprinkled with water and wrapped in towels to rehydrate them. We sample the hot breads, which are torn or snipped with scissors, never cut. Smoky and tender, rolled up with homemade butter and cheese, cilantro, purple basil, and red onion, this lavash is phenomenal.

Armenians love wood-cooked food – every roadside eatery has a tonir or outdoor fireplace — perhaps because wood warmed them during hard times. The country was under Soviet rule for 70 years, ending in the early 1990s. And though 25 years has passed since independence, almost everyone we meet mentions the difficult years following the Soviets’ departure. The country had just suffered from an earthquake and after a war with Azerbaijan, the gas supply was cut off and the population was left without heat. They deforested the countryside, even burning park benches and old books to provide warmth during the bitter cold winters, says Klein.

Almost wherever you go in Yerevan and heading west, you can see snow-peaked Mount Ararat, important to Armenians as the place where Noah’s Ark was said to have landed, but located now in Turkey. Proud Armenians will tell you that they are looking at the best side of Ararat. “[The Turks] got the mountain,’’ an architect tells me. “We got the view.’’

What is striking in Yerevan, a city with wide boulevards, ornate 19th century buildings, and a thriving night life (think Paris before the war), are cement apartment houses built by the Soviets initially to provide universal housing, then in the late-Soviet era, erected with poor materials to make unsightly structures.

We head down an alley one night to one of these buildings, which is quite close to Republic Square in the center of the city. We follow Klein in darkness until she finds a passageway leading to an apartment house where a friend lives. There are no lights, only a steep flight of cement stairs, and a box to enter a code. We step into a tiny, rickety elevator and can smell the cooking aromas in the flats above. “Hope we get there,’’ says Dakessian, pulling the door shut.

Inside her apartment, noted botanist Eleanora (Nora) Gabrielian, 86, has set out beautiful tableware and an elegant spread that she tells us later took her two days to prepare. She explains to Dakessian in Armenian that the soup she is making, chanakh, is also called “eat and be quiet.’’ It contains beef, onions, chickpeas, potatoes, zucchini, eggplant, okra, tomatoes, quince, dried plums, coriander, basil, parsley, and something the two decide, after perusing several of Gabrielian’s books on flora, is summer savory.

On the table are bowls of walnuts, which the botanist has boiled to remove the shells, chickpeas with thyme, green beans, romaine hearts with buffalo-yogurt and sour-cream dressing, pickled cauliflower, tabbouleh, egg salad with butter and herbs, big slaps of feta, large trays of parsley and dill, eggplant rounds with tomato sauce, lavash, a fruit platter so elaborate it looks like a still life, chanakh, and beef simmered with pomegranate seeds, served with the ancient grain, einkorn.

“I’m going home and completely redoing my menu,’’ announces Dakessian.

Seta Dakessian will hold classes on traditional Armenian dishes ($85 per person, $160 for two) on Feb. 7, March 6, and March 20. Each includes a cooking demo and dinner. Seta’s Cafe, 271 Belmont St., Belmont, 617-484-7823, www.setascafe.com.

Sheryl Julian can be reached at sheryl.julian@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @sheryljulian