A WELCOME FAMILY OUTING
By PETE WELLS
New York Times
July 10 2012
ANY time a server in Manhattan informs you that “all our food is
served family style,” you can be certain that the dining room will
be notably free of actual families. Platters that might feed two
children and their parents are more likely to languish before a herd
of bachelors and bachelorettes, who will reflexively hoist forks to
their mouths while getting drunk on cocktails invented by publicists.
I found myself wondering where all the family restaurants have gone
while spending time at Almayass, which opened this spring on East
21st Street, a few steps from the gang-grazing mess halls of lower
Park Avenue. Every time I ate there I saw enormous tables covered
with lemony hummus, yogurt-coated eggplant dolmas and canapés of
spiced meats under quail’s-egg bull’s-eyes, and at least one of
those tables would be swarmed by a large clan, from grandparents to
their children to their children’s tiny infants taking a turn on one
shoulder after another.
This was unusual enough in that part of town; still more striking
was that whenever a baby vocalized some urgent complaint, there were
no grimaces of infanticidal rage at the other tables. Or on the
faces of the people working there, several of them members of the
Alexandrian family.
Rita and Shant Alexandrian, the children of Armenians who fled the 1915
purge and later settled in Lebanon, operate the original Almayass in
Beirut and its spinoffs in Kuwait, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Qatar, all
of them with Armenian-Lebanese menus shaped by their family history.
In fact, family values set the tone for the whole experience of eating
at Almayass. At times that is refreshing; occasionally, like one’s
own family, it can drive you slightly bananas.
One waiter, for instance, played the overbearing uncle. When we asked
for suggestions, he wrote down what he thought we should eat. It took
some haggling to replace any of his selections with one of our own.
Another reminded us of the kind of shiftless cousin who never stays
focused. He seemed to forget we were there for vast periods of time.
When we had all finished the initial pours of a bottle of white Chateau
Musar, one man at our table flagged him down to ask for a refill. The
waiter emptied the bottle into his glass, filling it almost to the
brim, as the rest of us stared.
Although I never determined which servers were related and which were
merely in the wrong line of work, there were moments at Almayass when
I understood why there are laws against nepotism.
Yet sooner or later the table would be spread with food, and
sometimes that is enough, especially when the flavors are ones you
don’t taste every day. That’s definitely the case at Almayass, where
the Alexandrians punch up Lebanese dishes with Armenian accents like
lemony grains of crushed red sumac berries and flecks of Aleppo pepper
that offer more robust flavor than fiery heat. The restaurant even
stages a Manhattan comeback for some Armenian classics.
Another question: Where have Armenian restaurants gone? A fixture of
the city’s dining scene 50 years ago, they had all but vanished by the
end of the last century. Ever since, certain New Yorkers have nursed
longings for subereg, a labor-intensive lasagna variant, and basterma,
considered by some cured-meat connoisseurs the highest form to which
pastrami can aspire.
Both desires can be requited at Almayass. One woman at my table
hadn’t tasted subereg since the death of an Armenian aunt who was
educated in a French convent in Istanbul; she pronounced Almayass’s
exquisitely tender and subtle version “right,” if not quite as good
as the suberegs of her memories. The tangy and peppery basterma made a
strong case for the Armenian charcuterie canon. So did an intense beef
salami called soujuk, especially the version topped with sliced lemon
and ground sumac, doused with arrack and set on fire at tableside.
An Armenian bulgur salad named Itch (how it must hate its parents for
that), with chopped herbs and tomatoes, had a red-pepper glow that
kept luring me back, once the chill of the refrigerator had worn off.
The bulk of the cooking, though, is Lebanese, ranging from terrific
dips to less terrific kebabs. Meats and seafood at Almayass tended to
be overcooked; grilled prawns one night were so tough that I sliced
them with effort and swallowed them with regret.
I found only one main course that I truly enjoyed, broiled lamb
chops that you pick up by their ribs so you can swab them in a secret
Almayass sauce that seems to go into nearly everything, but tasted
especially welcome here.
The hunting was happier among the small dishes. The salads, like
green olives dressed with a spicy tomato sauce and lemon juice, tasted
radiant, a Levantine beach-side afternoon beamed down to Flatiron.
I would have happily eaten a fistful of the kebbe sajieh, fried
pockets of beef and bulgur kneaded together and stuffed with walnuts
and pistachios.
And while the pita had no charm, that mattered less when it was dunked
into dips like the lemony charred eggplant mash called moutabbal;
its cousin, moutabbal Almayass, made with beets and tahini; and the
mouhammara, a rust-colored paste of walnuts and red pepper that gets
its sweet-sour shuffle from pomegranate molasses.
Parties of eight or more, and not just multigenerational families,
seem drawn to Almayass. In part this is because ordering for that
many people lessens the impact of the occasional rogue kebab. (In
small-plates restaurants as in insurance, the larger the participating
group, the lower the risk to the individual.)
But these big tables may also be responding to some kind of secret
signal of hospitality sent out by the unmistakably family-run
restaurant. One Alexandrian sister, Siran, designed the menus,
with their covers of inlaid wood; another, Alidz, watches over the
dining room with Varak, her brother; their mother, Rita, chose the
sculpture of blue-glass flowers on wire stems and other works by
Lebanese artists around the interior. Almayass can be frustrating
and deeply idiosyncratic at times, but it always feels personal.
The Armenian restaurant scene, it turns out, went west, to greater Los
Angeles. As for family restaurants, they thrive in the outer boroughs,
exiled by the forces of real estate. When somebody dares to open
one in Manhattan now, it’s worth marking the event. I’d recommend
celebrating with a plate or two of flaming soujuk.
Almayass
â~X…
24 East 21st Street (Broadway); (212) 473-3100; almayassnyc.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/dining/reviews/almayass-in-manhattan-restaurant-review.html?pagewanted=all