Anoush offers fine international fare

Anoush Deli and International Food Market serves a wide range of ethnic dishes from gyros, borsch with rye bread and intricately decorated biscuit cakes. Among the beverages available is Vimto, a Middle Eastern fruit drink. (Photos by N. Scott Trimble/The Columbian)

Anoush Deli’s homemade biscuit cakes are a mix of vanilla and espresso layers coated in cinnamon and other spices.

Why: With its Olympian selection of groceries and other goods from Greece and around the Middle East, its freshly baked cakes and pastries and homemade gyros, Anoush Deli and International Food Market recently added Russian fare to its daily offerings. Now, borsch (or borscht) sits alongside pelmeni (Russian dumplings), hummus and a variety of other sandwiches. Owner Art Nazaretuian is Armenian by descent, and he brings a strong cross-cultural feeling to the menu, so you can span several countries in one meal. As if to prove it, Anoush features Greek, French, Danish and Bulgarian feta cheese in a case also stocked with square and heart-shaped sausages, a range of olives, cured fish and sauces.

Atmosphere: If you want to feel like Andrew Zimmern from the Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods” for a day without leaving the familiar confines of Vancouver, Anoush is the place for you. Not only is it filled with foods unpronounceable to the unadventurous, it also features magazines, videos and even medicines from throughout the world. The seating area for the deli is nestled amid all these products, and while it might not be your typical dining locale, it does have the flavor of a Mediterranean street market, bristling with people and products that will make you curious to browse. Customers can place their orders at the counter when they enter, then take a seat and wait for the food to arrive.

Food: The gyros include a mix of lamb and beef on soft pita bread with crisp lettuce, ripe tomatoes, onions, spices and tzatziki, plus the option of feta. I opted for a gyro and a bowl of borsch, which is served with Anoush’s homemade rye or white bread. I chose rye, which nicely complemented the sweet, tangy borsch. The soup was less blazingly red in color than some that I’ve had, but was filled with sliced beets and potatoes, which had taken on the orange hue of the broth, as well as seasoned beef. It needed no salt or pepper, although the dollop of sour cream was a welcome addition.

My dining companion opted for a vegetarian gyro, which looked like a pale imitation of mine. It turned out to be exactly the same, except instead of the traditional meat mix, it had some sort of rubbery Swiss-style cheese on it. She would have rather simply had more feta and no Swiss at all. Unless you’re an herbivore, stick to the traditional gyro, which is delicious. Even if you don’t eat meat, you’d probably be better off simply getting a side of hummus and some tzatziki, which is fresh, creamy and filled with enough garlic to put a vampire in the emergency room.

In addition to traditional sodas, Anoush has a cold case along the back wall that is filled with sodas, teas, juices and kefir, a European relative of yogurt that appears to be drinkable. They also sell Vimto, a popular carbonated fruit beverage from the Middle East that is quite sweet, but totally refreshing if you’re not prone to sugar shock. While we’re on the subject of sweet, we finished off our meal with one of the homemade biscuit cakes, a mix of vanilla and espresso layers coated in cinnamon and other spices and topped with grasslike frosting and mushroom-shaped cookies.It was dense and, surprisingly, not overly sweet.

Quick take: Anoush Deli and International Food Market is just what it sounds like, serving freshly made gyros, hummus, borsch, pelmeni, bread and pastries among a jaw-dropping selection of groceries, media and medicines from across Europe and Russia.

Price: The standard gyro is $5.49, add 35 cents for feta, and a veggie gyro is $4.49. A bowl of borsch with bread is $2.99, and a bowl of pelmeni in broth is $5.75. A side of hummus will run you $1.75. Other sandwiches, which include standard toppings such as turkey and roast beef, will set you back $4.99. The biscuit cake was $2.50, while other pastries ran between $1.50 and $3 for individual servings. The prices vary on a range of full-size cakes and traditional European-style breads.

Hours: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday.

Where: 6808 E. Fourth Plain Blvd. Suite L, Vancouver.

Contact: 360-693-4359.

Health score: Anoush Deli and International Food Market received a score of 17 on June 19. Zero is a perfect score, and Clark County Public Health closes restaurants that score 100 or higher. For more information, call 360-397-8428 or see www.clark.wa.gov.