Nauts!

We’re sticking with a theme, here, making our way across the lands of antiquity from the Mediterranean to the Caucasus. And we’ve landed at the crossroads of empire for this autumnal feast. It’s a first for us, and long overdue.

In fact, we’ve been looking for the right place to hold an Armenian feast for nearly five years. But until Ben went to Beirut and was introduced to the splendors of Al Mayass, we had long discounted that we could find authentic Armenian food outside Yerevan. Lo and behold, And thus prodded, Curtiss went to work, charming and cajoling our host Mario, to go way off the menu and cook for us an extraordinary meal.

These are the kind of places we love (OK, fine, it’s in Manhattan so that’s a small demerit): the kind of places wedged between great cuisines like Turkey and Iran, that mix all the good stuff together so well that everyone ends up fighting to say it’s theirs originally. And they fight a lot in this part of the world.

But what a meal we’ve wrangled for you: from beef tongue to lamb sweetbreads, from a hearty cow and pig’s foot stew (made especially for us) to fried liver and kidneys, we’ve got a nine-course country-style feast for the kind of people that don’t trust vegetables (or Turks, for that matter). But trust us, if this place is half as good as its progenitor in Beirut, you’ll be blown away.