Almayass in Manhattan - NYTimes.com Large parties are no stranger at Almayass, where the menu includes soujuk flambée. 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.